Indelible
Simpson looked up at his kind-hearted mother, wondering if, one day, she'd be proved wrong—but, now, tonight, then, forever, he was happy enough to trust her ... otherwise he would have died of fright without first having the grounds to grow old enough, old enough to understand. Meanwhile, or much earlier, or never at all, in a London office, a cleaning-lady said: "I had a good go at the thing last Monday." And whatever the 'thing' happened to be, she was just leaving as I arrived for work at the office. I acknowledged her—in my usual flick-tail fashion—and busied myself with the day's dockets. They had piled up since the evening before. No rest for the wicked, I thought—an expression I never fully understood, one which ancient housewives used on washdays. I always remember my father, too, as he painstakingly painted ‘best-by’ dates on our own pet hens’ eggs. Whilst, soon, my colleagues would be arriving brimful with horrific stories of British Rail, London Transport and the M25 ring road. I always tried to arrive before the office was strictly open. That obliged the likes of Beryl and Jeremy and Claudette (and Simpson, of course) to say a good morning to me first, since I had already become master of my own castle when the others had not even lowered their own draw-bridges to get in. It took the embarrassing edge off the day.
That silly biddy of an office cleaner (or batting-lady as they used to be called in my younger days), what on earth had she meant by a "good go at the thing" last Monday? She was all mouth and padding. I surveyed my desk. The blotter was spotless and the squat jars of creamy correcting-fluid lined up like soldiers on parade. I lifted the telephone handset—yes, it faintly smelled of that hygienic spray which the batting-lady applied to it during her regular Monday morning shiftwork. The dockets themselves were paper-clipped and neatly splayed in a semicircle as if a conjuror had made one sweep of a deck of trick cards. What she must have meant, then, was that she had bottomed-out the drinks vending-machine. It had stunk to high heaven the day before yesterday. Nobody had dared use it. Except Simpson, of course: the office idiot. Simpson would say anything for a laugh: like there were "black thingies doing the breast-stroke" in the lemon tea. Then, jump-start Jeremy had perked up at the expression breast-stroke and obtained a drink for himself, which he gulped with one inverted hiccup. "Life itself is a risk," wide-boy Jeremy had said to silly-arse Simpson. "You could get killed crossing the road soon as miss a blink."
I laughed at the double-barrelled nicknames which I meaningfully threw around about my office colleagues like invisible gravestones. But, whatever the case, I usually preferred the vending-machine's hot chocolate but lately most of its ingredients were revealed as congealed at the bottom of the plastic beaker. And, amid these dregs, I had re-lived events from the night before, events which had involved drain-pipe Simpson (he was a drip) and a beat-nick girl who was a stranger. "What shall I choose for horse's dovers?" she had asked pointblank. Her escort, cock-eye Simpson, looked askance for a fleeting moment, then, with the irritant of light dawning, suggested the prawn cocktail. "I dunno, I feel like something garlicky and, yes, cheesy, with a touch of tomato." The strange-look girl giggled as she brushed a sprig of hair from in front of her heavily made up eyes, as if that helped concentration. Simpson peered quizzically at the menu. He'd seen menu cards before, but these were tantamount to body-size! It did serve as a blind. He could kill shock-jock Jeremy for landing this female stranger on him tonight of all nights. Hallowe'en was a night Simpson usually spent at home with his mother and, instead, here he had to conduct a form of baby-sitting. Or should he call it baby-eating? (Looking after her whilst he ate, you see.) He laughed at his own silent joke.
"Did you say something, Simpson?" asked the girl stranger.
"Oh, no, I was simply rehearsing the order."
Simpson's lame reply passed muster okay, but he blushed to the roots of his hair—and beyond. Her voice piped up again: "What are you having for horse's dovers?" He winced at the repetition of the clumsy childish joke expression for hors d’oeuvres. He winced even deeper upon noticing that she had tucked her linen serviette into the top of her dress, hanging over her small bosom, hemmed corners in her lap. It already bore a noticeable stain. "Oh, I think I'll go for the seafood tureen," he answered, in a humouring tone. Outside could be heard the shouts of trick-or-treaters echoing down the street. A train trundled underneath the restaurant—a regular sound in this part of London. Despite its position, however, the restaurant was posher than the usual ones Simpson patronised. The waiters were polite, if officious, and one particular handsome fellow had passed a tiny crumb-hoover over the tablecloth as if it were some ritual to rid the settings of previous eaters. Such devices irritated Simpson, as did those scalding flannels ridiculously packaged in cling-film which Indian Restaurants handed out following their curry and tandoori concoctions, as if the finger-bowls were not enough. Yet, no such exoticisms in this place. This was a meat and two vedge joint, if an up market one. Here, apron-string Simpson could have brought his mother—someone who ever moaned about bean shoots and other such "foreign muck". Surreptitiously looking around the side of what seemed to be an ever-growing fold-over stand-up menu card, Simpson indeed decided there was not much to choose between the girl and his mother. What was age between people like that?
"Oh, I don't think I can eat much tonight."
Now she says! Why ever suggest coming to a restaurant, in that case? Loud-mouthed Jeremy had a lot to answer for. Simpson, even Simpson, had taken out more companionable Great Aunts than this slice of female near-humanity was proving to be! He laughed again. Absurdity was sometimes preferable to common sense. Indeed, some events were more memorable because of their negative points. And what was existence without the stickability of memories? Bad memories were preferable to none. Black letter days, if not so good as red ones, stood out—became landmarks in an otherwise waste-ground of amnesic blandness. Or had he got his red and black confused? Death was the ultimate amnesia, of course, without which there could have been no life in the first place. And as I continued to re-live that dream-restaurant scene by scrying the office beaker's dregs, I was wondering why beakers were called beakers, but then buxom Beryl bustled in, wielding heavily cosmeticked cheeks.
"The buses were at a standstill right across London Bridge—and I could have walked quicker," she said with a toss of her aspirin-crushed-upon face. Beryl was younger than her plumpness portended. She often referred to her husband as if she were about to change him for a newer model. Characteristics piled up in no logical order. Beryl all over. Stork-leg Claudette was said to have a man at home, too. As far as looks were concerned, Claudette was a different bar-room talking-point altogether. Thus, she easily managed to provoke jump-start Jeremy. A case of mutual sexual harrassment: a self-perpetuating series of back-biting and back-scratching. And, believe it or not, wide-boy Jeremy actually thought himself to be sexy with that cheap medallion dangling upon a blatantly hairy chest. All mouth and trousers was Jeremy. A man's man. Or various words to that order.
The first phone to ring was always on my desk, a phone sleeping, as it were, with one ear cocked. Then, if it wasn't placated, it hunted round the other phones in a strict order, an order set quite arbitrarily by the original engineers whose blueprints turned out to be little better than pink blancmange. I failed to understand why everybody else was so damn inefficient. I picked up the beast with one fell swoop of my arm in a well-rehearsed arc. "Yes?" I had had never been taught telephone etiquette. It was jump-start Jeremy reporting in sick—as he had done, it seemed, every Monday morning since Kingdom come. In the meantime, chirp-cheap Claudette had arrived late, shaking out her frilly umbrella from a sudden shower, as if the umbrella were a large vampire-bat fresh from skinny-dipping. She looked round to see if she was the last to have arrived.
"How was it this morning, dear?" Buxom Beryl didn't even look up from her under-sized newspaper, as she offered small talk to stork-leg Claudette. "We got stuck in a tunnel for half an hour," Claudette replied, her pretty face seeming smudged with smuts of soot. Beryl tutted so loudly, I thought it was someone breaking combs under the desk. That village idiot is late again, I said to myself, in reference to Simpson. He was beyond a joke. I would have to report him upwards, before long. Claudette was combing out her long locks, with swishing sighs. She evidently wanted to look as nice as possible before venturing into the ladies' rest room to put the finishing touches to her demeanour with the help of a full-blown mirror and buxom Beryl's loan of cosmetic. Meanwhile, I returned to the beaker's dregs and the strange girl in the restaurant also blamed loud-faced Jeremy for this evening. Simpson was fast becoming a dead bore—always dithering with pointless thought. There had never been any question of horse's dovers, of course. Prawns were never red enough. Pinkness was worse than no colour at all, to her mind. Why couldn't he have a sense of humour? Still, she had a lot to learn from others, even from daft cases like Simpson and she abruptly brought him back into the land of the living with her considered choice for her main (and only) course (or entrée as they called it here). The better class of waiter whom the restaurant employed had made the decision from among all their life-size menu photographs far more difficult. The waiters were indeed all relatively young and good-looking. The one picked was eventually escorted into the kitchen by the leathery head chef, for his neck to be tapped with one of those new-fangled gold-plated spigots restaurants seemed to provide these days. But then, a solitary trick-or-treater made a raucous sally into the body of the restaurant, in search of donations for his bonfire. He sported a Dracula mask, a mask looking remarkably like Jeremy's face. The girl shrugged and looked to simple-sample Simpson for even simpler enlightenment. She was bereft of the hidebound niceties that longevity instilled. Consequently, Simpson threw off his "village idiot" soul and thought thoughts with a sudden dawning of dark pleasure, thoughts that the girl probably was a real tasty starter of a once dead girl. He signalled to a disused waiter who was a bit too long in the tooth to be toothsome and asked for the A La Carte menu. Meanwhile, back in the land of the wicked, my office phone, having broken into a feat of renewed trilling, I pretended to have heard the fax machine by the window break into life and wandered over to it, evidently to see what was written on the slippery paper which would have slid from between the rollers. In this way, the phone ceased on my desk and started ringing on wide-boy Jeremy's.
Big-bosomed Beryl raised her head lackadaisically and began to stare at the shrill creature with a look sufficiently old-fashioned to make a prize-fighter curl up in his corner. There was very little point to her consternation since the blower's pesky pinecat screeching, if unanswered, would soon renew its petulance elsewhere. So, she picked up the nearest phone extension by its wildly whipping tail at the first suspicion of the tongue-click which prefigured the full-blown spat of stinging sound hunting over to her desk. And, finding the fax machine had not given birth, I wondered why people called phones blowers. There was no accounting for words. A close squeak. Beakers. No rest for the wicked.
Beryl's face was ashes. Claudette's a picture of cosmosis interruptus. Evidently shocking news had been imparted via the phone. They were pointing madly at Simpson's empty desk and then at the offending drinks vending-machine. I creased up. The machine had been gargling for days, as if whatever creature lived inside it had drunk all the variously flavoured fluids for itself and was about to explode through the narrow dispenser. I abruptly had a very strange imagining—by means of an instinct drawn from word association rather than from a grasp of reality—an imagining that jump-start Jeremy moonlighted in drag, masquerading as the office cleaning lady each Monday morning with a disguise more impenetrable even than buxom Beryl's cosmetic face-mask. Better than that vampire mask I had seen him wearing in the dregs. But what about poor simple-sample Simpson? Bottomed out beyond even a joke's joke, now. No rest for his wicked belly. There was the sad sound in the office of comb-teeth snapping one by one. And, months later, Simpson entered in clothes that reminded me of those I had worn only the day before. "Surprise! Surprise!" he said. "Hi, Simpson, sit yourself down and have a nice cup of tea," I said, in turn offering him a seat beside the framed picture of his dead mother, the latter being a present he had given me. Simpson and I had become fast friends, ever since the office redundancies. In fact, we had previously been rather kept apart by the job ... both of us preferring to be homebirds, watching TV or doing odd jobs. Better than negotiating the realms of commuting any day.
"Thanks for the Birthday present," he said, stirring the tea I had soon prepared.
"It's nothing. Don't think any more about it."
I noticed he was sporting all the items of clothing I had only wrapped yesterday ... before leaving the parcel on his doorstep. He replaced the cup on the saucer, stood up, preened himself and strutted his outfit with a quick flourish.
"I thought you'd like them," I said.
"Yes," he said, "but I'm afraid they must have been frightfully expensive."
"Well, to be absolutely honest, Simpson—they're slightly body-soiled and I managed to haggle the price."
"Oh, they seem OK." He gave his own length the once over, as if expecting to see stains he'd previously missed.
"They look much better in a mirror," I suddenly said for no accountable reason, staring at the black wallpaper. He smiled, recognising something his mother always used to say, no doubt. It was as if his mother made me say things from the grave ... despite her having been cremated. Later, I switched on the TV—not for Simpson and I to watch it as such but for it to act as a sponge for our otherwise awkward silences. There was a film on but neither of us followed it. Well, strange to look back on it now, but the film almost followed us. Two characters, with a few seconds delay, mimicking our strained faces and clumsy gestures ... and Pinteresque exchanges. Then the weather forecast came on and I decided to speak my mind for the first time that evening: "It's getting a bit hard on my pocket, you know, Simpson." He nodded. He seemed as if he knew exactly what I meant—but, for the sake of something other than completeness, I elaborated: "All these clothes I keep buying you as presents ... the cost is leaving me well—how shall I put it?—embarrassed." He nodded, this time with a gaze of mystification. I continued: "Buying necessaries for two is stretching my resources to their limit. It's not my fault that your mother only left you a small annuity." He looked away and pretended an interest in tomorrow's coastal temperatures. A cold snap coming, apparently. But the map on the TV screen was of no country I could recognise.
Knocking Church Street was usually a quiet place, although it slightly cheated by having sleeping policemen humps to deprive the rat runners and back doublers of their self-indulgent conduits of least resistance. Office commuters were evil people at the best of time. Luckily there were fewer and fewer offices these days to draw them into the city. Simpson remembers his mother saying (when they lived on Knocking Church Street): "A good marriage is one where each of you have clothes that can only be worn if you have to have help in dressing, for example, a top where the buttons are at the back..." As a child, he would nod. As a grown-up, he would repeat his mother's sayings. I would react with wide eyes and cooing noises. Bearing in mind its name, it was inevitable, I suppose, that Knocking Church Street ended up completely demolished ... towards the end of Simpson's childhood, a period when puberty was a burden rather than an awakening. He still possesses an old map with Knocking Church Street shown. It was an oval street. Never ever been anything like it, since or before. An endless street of terraced housing, two crescents in one, with odd numbering...
I was interrupted from my revery by my stomach bubbling. I hadn't eaten for ages. But I decided to ignore it. Simpson was fiddling with the TV trying to find something else not to watch. He never seemed to return to his own home. He used my place as if it were his. "Pardon me," I said. The noise in my stomach was getting worse, almost flatulent, starting to interrupt my speech as I tried to pursue our earlier conversation with words which I meant to be as cruel as they sounded: "You'd take the clothes off my own back rather than open your wallet..." I dared not look down, since my stomach noises were fast resembling that of a pet dog or, even, a wild beast. Indeed, I felt such a creature gnawing my toes. "...and I now find ,” I continued, “that you can afford to go to the pictures every afternoon—and seeing all those horror films can't be good for you..." Cinemas seemed a waste of time to me. The films they showed always became old ones that TV later showed when nobody was watching. Meanwhile, the noises were attached to me in some way as if the stomach itself was an autonomous animal. I wriggled in my seat. I could only see two bloated noses. Cold as ice. Death was such whatever the heat. Even eggshells melted on the last sell-by day of them all. Cremated dreams.
Simple Simpson switched off the TV and put on my fur coat. It was time for him to go to the pictures. I hoped the cinema screen would also be black and the films projected on it even blacker. That would serve him right. I expect he meets buxom Beryl on these trips to the pictures. I wonder what happened to that eyelid-batting Claudette. She must still be young enough to be office-bound. Each sleep's clumsy commuting back into consciouness remained a rancid starter, a beakerful of curdled black blood prefiguring the day's tasteless banquet. Or, worse still, she might be married, despite his death, to that jump-start Jeremy, and caring for his creature comforts. Combing that wide-boy’s broken locks. Filing his wayward teeth. Grooming his goatee. Waxing and oiling his scrawny chest. Pampering his bready thighs. Blowing gently upon his belly-button. Preening his prawn starter. But I no longer possessed a mind where to wield such surreptitious surrealism, indeed no thoughts at all with which to fill out the necessary forms and dockets for the well-ordering of my soul. Indeed, my last thought was being thankful that, despite being female, I never became a mother myself —with nobody thus burdened with carrying the relay baton of my existence by means of the resurrection of my mind's meanderings amid the cold dregs of an uncertain future. Or, perhaps, my very last thought was thinking of that strange, if now very familiar, girl in the restaurant with train trundling below—a girl not so strange as to be a complete stranger to me of all people.
I sobbed and placed my hungry lips, in turn, to each fleshy spigot that I had raised from my fresh-opened wrists. Blood, they say, is God’s own correcting-fluid.
