AFTER THE ACCIDENT -some time after the accident, after I’d come out of my coma and my memory had come back and my broken bones had set-I had to learn how to move. The part of my brain that controls the motor functions of the right side of my body had been damaged. It had been damaged pretty irreparably, so the physiotherapist had to do something called “rerouting”.
Rerouting is exactly what it sounds like: finding a new route through the brain for commands to run along. It’s sort of like a government compulsorily purchasing land from farmers to run train tracks over after the terrain the old tracks ran through has been flooded or landslid away. The physiotherapist had to route the circuit that transmits commands to limbs and muscles through another patch of brain-an unused, fallow patch, the part that makes you able to play tiddlywinks, listen to chart music, whatever.
To cut and lay the new circuits, what they do is make you visualize things. Simple things, like lifting a carrot to your mouth. For the first week or so they don’t give you a carrot, or even make you try to move your hand at all: they just ask you to visualize taking a carrot in your right hand, wrapping your fingers round it and then levering your whole forearm upwards from the elbow until the carrot reaches your mouth. They make you understand how it all works: which tendon does what, how each joint rotates, how angles, upward force and gravity contend with and counterbalance one another. Understanding this, and picturing yourself lifting the carrot to your mouth, again and again and again, cuts circuits through your brain that will eventually allow you to perform the act itself. That’s the idea.
But the act itself, when you actually come to try it, turns out to be more complicated than you thought. There are twenty-seven separate manoeuvres involved. You’ve learnt them, one by one, in the right order, understood how they all work, run through them in your mind, again and again and again, for a whole week-lifted more than a thousand imaginary carrots to your mouth, or one imaginary carrot more than a thousand times, which amounts to the same thing. But then you take a carrot-they bring you a fucking carrot, gnarled, dirty and irregular in ways your imaginary carrot never was, and they stick it in your hands-and you know, you just know as soon as you see the bastard thing that it’s not going to work.
“Go for it,” said the physiotherapist. He laid the carrot on my lap, then moved back from me slowly, as though I were a house of cards, and sat down facing me.
Before I could lift it I had to get my hand to it. I swung my palm and fingers upwards from the wrist, but then to bring the whole hand towards where the carrot was I’d have to slide the elbow forwards, pushing from the shoulder, something I hadn’t learnt or practised yet. I had no idea how to do it. In the end I grabbed my forearm with my left hand and just yanked it forwards.
“That’s cheating,” said the physio, “but okay. Try to lift the carrot now.”
I closed my fingers round the carrot. It felt-well, it felt: that was enough to start short-circuiting the operation. It had texture; it had mass. The whole week I’d been gearing up to lift it, I’d thought of my hand, my fingers, my rerouted brain as active agents, and the carrot as a no-thing-a hollow, a carved space for me to grasp and move. This carrot, though, was more active than me: the way it bumped and wrinkled, how it crawled with grit. It was cold. I grasped it and went into Phase Two, the hoist, but even as I did I felt the surge of active carrot input scrambling the communication between brain and arm, firing off false contractions, locking muscles at the very moment it was vital they relax and expand, twisting fulcral joints the wrong directions. As the carrot rolled, slipped and plummeted away I understood how air traffic controllers must feel in the instant when they know a plane is just about to crash, and that they can do nothing to prevent it.
“First try,” said my physio.
“At least it didn’t fall on anyone,” I said.
“Let’s go for it again.”
It took another week to get it right. We went back to the blackboard, factoring in the surplus signals we’d not factored in before, then back through visualization, then back to a real carrot again. I hate carrots now. I still can’t eat them to this day.
Everything was like this. Everything, each movement: I had to learn them all. I had to understand how they work first, break them down into each constituent part, then execute them. Walking, for example: now that’s very complicated. There are seventy-five manoeuvres involved in taking a single step forward, and each manoeuvre has its own command. I had to learn them all, all seventy-five. And if you think That’s not so bad: we all have to learn to walk once; you just had to learn it twice, you’re wrong. Completely wrong. That’s just it, see: in the normal run of things you never learn to walk like you learn swimming, French or tennis. You just do it without thinking how you do it: you stumble into it, literally. I had to take walking lessons. For three whole weeks my physio wouldn’t let me walk without his supervision, in case I picked up bad habits-holding my head wrong, moving my foot before I’d bent my knee, who knows what else. He was like an obsessive trainer, one of those ballet or ice-skating coaches from behind the old iron curtain.
“Toes forward! Forward, damn it!” he’d shout. “More knee! Lift!” He’d bang his fist against the board, against his diagrams.
Every action is a complex operation, a system, and I had to learn them all. I’d understand them, then I’d emulate them. At first, for the first few months, I did everything very slowly.
“You’re learning,” my physio said; “and besides, your muscles are still plastic.”
“Plastic?”
“Plastic. Rigid. It’s the opposite of flaccid. With time they’ll go flaccid: malleable, relaxed. Flaccid, good; plastic, bad.”
Eventually I not only learnt to execute most actions but also came up to speed. Almost up to speed-I never got back to one hundred per cent. Maybe ninety. By April I was already almost up to speed, up to my ninety. But I still had to think about each movement I made, had to understand it. No Doing without Understanding: the accident bequeathed me that for ever, an eternal detour.
After I’d been out of hospital for a week or so, I went to the cinema with my friend Greg. We went to the Ritzy to see Mean Streets with Robert De Niro. Two things were strange about this. One was watching moving images. My memory had come back to me in moving images, as I mentioned earlier-like a film run in instalments, a soap opera, one five-year episode each week or so. It hadn’t been particularly exciting; in fact, it had been quite mundane. I’d lain in bed and watched the episodes as they arrived. I’d had no control over what happened. It could have been another history, another set of actions and events, like when there’s been a mix-up and you get the wrong holiday photos back from the chemist’s. I wouldn’t have known or cared differently, and would have accepted them the same. As I watched Mean Streets with Greg I felt no lesser a degree of detachment and indifference, but no greater one either, even though the actions and events had nothing to do with me.
The other thing that struck me as we watched the film was how perfect De Niro was. Every move he made, each gesture was perfect, seamless. Whether it was lighting up a cigarette or opening a fridge door or just walking down the street: he seemed to execute the action perfectly, to live it, to merge with it until he was it and it was him and there was nothing in between. I commented on this to Greg as we walked back to mine.
“But the character’s a loser,” Greg said. “And he messes everything up for all the other characters.”
“That doesn’t matter,” I answered. “He’s natural when he does things. Not artificial, like me. He’s flaccid. I’m plastic.”
“He’s the plastic one, I think you’ll find,” said Greg, “being stamped onto a piece of film and that. I mean, you’ve got the bit above your eye, but…”
“That’s not what I mean,” I said. I’d had a small amount of plastic surgery on a scar above my right eye. “I mean that he’s relaxed, malleable. He flows into his movements, even the most basic ones. Opening fridge doors, lighting cigarettes. He doesn’t have to think about them, or understand them first. He doesn’t have to think about them because he and they are one. Perfect. Real. My movements are all fake. Second-hand.”
“You mean he’s cool. All film stars are cool,” said Greg. “That’s what films do to them.”
“It’s not about being cool,” I told him. “It’s about just being. De Niro was just being; I can never do that now.”
Greg stopped in the middle of the pavement and turned to face me.
“Do you think you could before?” he asked. “Do you think I can? Do you think that anyone outside of films lights cigarettes or opens fridge doors like that? Think about it: the lighter doesn’t spark first time you flip it, the first wisp of smoke gets in your eye and makes you wince; the fridge door catches and then rattles, milk slops over. It happens to everyone. It’s universal: everything fucks up! You’re not unusual. You know what you are?”
“No,” I said. “What?”
“You’re just more usual than everyone else.”
I thought about that for a long time afterwards, that conversation. I decided Greg was right. I’d always been inauthentic. Even before the accident, if I’d been walking down the street just like De Niro, smoking a cigarette like him, and even if it had lit first try, I’d still be thinking: Here I am, walking down the street, smoking a cigarette, like someone in a film. See? Second-hand. The people in the films aren’t thinking that. They’re just doing their thing, real, not thinking anything. Recovering from the accident, learning to move and walk, understanding before I could act-all this just made me become even more what I’d always been anyway, added another layer of distance between me and things I did. Greg was right, absolutely right. I wasn’t unusual: I was more usual than most.
I set about wondering when in my life I’d been the least artificial, the least second-hand. Not as a child, certainly: that’s the worst time. You’re always performing, copying other people, things you’ve seen them do-and copying them badly too. No, I decided it had been in Paris, a year before the accident. That’s where I’d met Catherine. She was American, from somewhere outside of Chicago. She worked for a large humanitarian organization, some kind of lobbying outfit. They’d sent her on the same intensive language course my company had sent me on. It strikes me as odd, thinking about it now, that she couldn’t have learnt French back in Illinois. Considering they’d lose me in a year, my company were making a bad investment-but they didn’t claim to be making it on behalf of starving children.
Anyway, I met Catherine while on that course. We hit it off together straight away. We’d get giggling fits in classes. We’d go out and get drunk in the evenings instead of doing homework. One time we found a rowing boat tied up on the Quai Malaquais embankment, climbed inside, untied it from its moorings and were just about to paddle it away using our hands when some men came along and turfed us out. Another time-well, there were lots of other times. The point is, though, that in Paris hanging out with Catherine I felt less self-conscious than I had at any other period of my life-more natural, more in-the-moment. Inside, not outside-as though we’d penetrated something’s skin: the city, perhaps, or maybe life itself. I really felt as though we’d got away with something.
We’d corresponded pretty regularly since then. It had dropped off on my part after the accident, of course, but as soon as I’d got my memory back I’d written to her and brought her up to date. In February, just as I was coming out of hospital, she’d written to tell me that she was being sent to Zimbabwe and would pass through London on the way back. We wrote more frequently after that. Our letters acquired a sexual undertone, something our in-person friendship had never had. I started imagining having sex with her. I developed various fantasy scenarios in which our first seduction might take place, which I’d play, refine, edit and play again.
In one of these scenarios, we were in my flat. We were standing in the hallway between the kitchen and the bedroom, although flashes of Paris and a Chicago which I’d never seen broke in, brasserie windows flanked with skyscrapers and windy canals jostling with the yellow walls. I’d say something witty and suggestive, and Catherine would reply You’ll have to show me or Why don’t you show me? or You’re really going to have to show me that, and then we’d kiss, floating towards my bedroom. In another version, we were somewhere in the country. I’d driven her out in my Fiesta, then drawn up and parked beside a field or wood. I’d have her standing in profile, because she looked better this way, with curly hair half-hiding her cheek. I’d move up close beside her, she’d turn to me, we’d kiss and then we’d end up making love in the Fiesta while treetops full of birds chirped and shrieked in ecstasy.
I never got this second sequence quite down, though, due to the difficulty of manoeuvring us both into the car without bumping our heads or tripping on the belts that always hung out from the doors. And then I’d worry about where I’d parked it, and whether someone might speed round a bend and crash into it like the drive-off guy from Peckham. The other scenario too, the corridor one: as we floated to the bedroom I’d remember there were loads of mouldy coffee cups beside the bed, and that the sheets were old and dirty. If it wasn’t that then it was that the neighbours were right outside and I hadn’t drawn the curtains and they’d start up a conversation through the windows, or-well, something always came along and short-circuited these imaginary seductions, fucked them up. Even my fantasies were plastic, imperfect, unreal.
When Catherine flew into London on the day the Settlement came through, I arrived at the airport just after her flight was due in. I saw from the Arrivals screens that it had landed and I hurried over to the area where the sliding screen doors separate the customs and immigration area from the public terminal. I leant against a rail and watched passengers emerge from these doors. It was interesting. Some of the arriving passengers scanned the waiting faces for relatives, but most weren’t being met. These ones came out carrying some kind of regard to show to the assembled crowd, some facial disposition they’d struck up just before the doors slid open for them. They might be trying to look hurried, as though they were urgently needed because they were very important and their businesses couldn’t run without them. Or they might look carefree, innocent and happy, as though unaware that fifty or sixty pairs of eyes were focused on them, just on them, if only for two seconds. Which of course they weren’t-unaware, I mean. How could you be? The strip between the railings and the doors was like a fashion catwalk, with models acting out different roles, different identities. I leant against the rail, watching this parade: one character after another, all so self-conscious, stylized, false. Other people really were like me; they just didn’t know they were. And they didn’t have eight and a half million pounds.
After a while I tired of watching all these amateur performances and decided to buy a coffee from a small concession a few feet away. It was a themed Seattle coffee bar where you buy caps, lattes and mochas, not coffees. When you order they say Heyy! to you, then they repeat your order aloud, correcting the word large into tall, small into short. I ordered a small cappuccino.
“Heyy! Short cap,” the man said. “Coming up! You have a loyalty card?”
“Loyalty card?” I said.
“Each time you visit us, you get a cup stamped,” he said, handing me a card. It had ten small pictures of coffee cups on it. “When you’ve stamped all ten, you get an extra cup for free. And a new card.”
“But I’m not here that often,” I said.
“Oh, we have branches everywhere,” he told me. “It’s the same deal.”
He stamped the first cup and handed me the cappuccino. Just then someone called my name and I turned round. It was Catherine. She’d cleared customs already and had been standing in the coffee bar all the time I’d been watching the sliding doors.
“Heyy!” I said. I went over and hugged her.
“I tried calling you,” said Catherine as we disentangled, “but your phone’s not working.”
“I’ve just become rich!” I said.
“Well heyy!”
“No, really. Just now, today.”
“How come?” she asked.
“Compensation for my accident.”
“My God! Of course!” She peered into my face. “You don’t look like-oh yes, you’ve got a scar right there.” She ran the first two fingers of her left hand down the scar above my right eye, the one I’d had plastic surgery on. When they got to the end of the scar’s track, they stayed there. She took them away just before they’d been there too long for the gesture to be ambiguous. “So they’ve paid up?” she said.
“An enormous amount.”
“How much?”
I hadn’t prepared myself for this question. I stuttered for an instant, then said: “Several-well, after tax and fees and things, a few hundred thousand.”
Maybe a kind of barrier came down between us right then. I felt bad about lying, but I couldn’t bring myself to say the whole amount. It just seemed so big, too much to even talk about.
We took the tube back to my flat. We sat beside each other, but her profile wasn’t quite as sexy as I’d made it by the field and the parked Fiesta in my fantasy. She had a couple of spots on her cheek. Her dirty and enormous purple backpack kept falling over from between her legs. When we arrived, the phone unit was still lying untwitching on the carpet.
“Wow! Did it get hit by lightning?” she said-then, with a gasp, added: “Oh! I’m sorry. I mean, I didn’t…I know it wasn’t lightning, but…”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “It doesn’t…I mean, I don’t think of it like…”
My sentence petered out too, and we stood facing one another in silence. Eventually Catherine asked:
“Can I go take a bath?”
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll run it for you. Would you like tea?”
“Tea!” she said. “That’s so English. Yes, I’d like tea.”
I made tea while she took her bath. I considered whether or not to open the door and take it in to her, but decided not to, set the cup down outside the bathroom and told her through the door that it was there.
“Cool,” she said. “Qu’est-ce qu’on fait ce soir?”
What are we doing this evening, she meant. I know she said it in French to try to remind us of our time in Paris, but I didn’t feel like answering in French. And I felt slightly miffed about the English quip. Of course tea is English: what did she expect?
“We’re meeting my friend Greg,” I said back through the door. “Near here, in Brixton.”
Greg was my best friend. It was he who’d hooked me up with Daubenay, through an uncle of his. He lived in Vauxhall-maybe still does, who knows. We’d arranged to meet in the Dogstar, a pub at the far end of Coldharbour Lane. He was already there when Catherine and I showed up, buying a pint of lager at the bar.
“Greg, Catherine-Catherine, Greg,” I said.
Greg asked us what we’d have. I said a lager. Catherine took one too, but said she wanted to use the toilet first and asked Greg where it was. Greg told her and then watched her as she walked off. Then he turned to me and asked:
“Friend, or ‘friend’?”
“F…” I began, then told him: “Greg, the Settlement’s come through.”
“Marc Daubenay’s swung it?”
“Yes. They’re settling out of court.”
“How much?” Greg asked.
I looked around, then lowered my voice to a whisper as I told him:
“More than one million pounds!”
By this point we were walking towards a table and Greg had a pint of lager in each hand. He came to a sudden standstill when I told him this-so quickly that some beer from his two glasses sloshed onto the wooden floor. He turned to face me, let out a whoop and made to hug me before realizing that he couldn’t while he was still holding the beers. He turned away again and hurried on towards the table, holding the hug, until he’d set the glasses down. Then he hugged me.
“Well done!” he said.
It felt strange-the whole exchange. I felt we hadn’t done it right. It would have seemed more genuine if he’d thrown the drinks up in the air and we’d danced a jig together while the golden drops rained slowly down on us, or if we’d been young aristocrats from another era, unimaginably wealthy lords and viscounts, and he’d just said quietly Good show, old chap before we moved on to discuss grouse shooting or some scandal at the opera. But this was neither-nor. And beer got on my elbow when I leant it on the table.
Catherine came back.
“Have you heard his news?” Greg asked her.
“Sure have,” she said. “Like wow! It’s so much money!”
“Keep the figure quiet,” I told them both. “I don’t want it to, you know…I still haven’t…”
“Sure,” they both said. Greg picked up his glass and toasted:
“Cheers!” he said. “To…well, to money!”
We clinked glasses. As I took the first sip of my lager I remembered Daubenay telling me I should go and drink a glass of champagne. I turned to Greg and Catherine and said:
“Why don’t I buy us a bottle of champagne?”
Neither of them answered straight away. Greg held his hands out in an open gesture, making goldfish motions with his mouth. Catherine looked down at the floor.
“Wow, champagne!” she muttered. “I guess I’m not acclimatized yet culturally. From Africa, I mean.”
Greg suddenly became all boisterous and cheery and said:
“We’ve got to! What the hell! Do they do it in here?”
We looked around. The pub wasn’t that full. There were scruffy, dreadlocked white guys wearing woolly jumpers, plus a few people in suits, plus this one weird guy sitting on his own without a drink, glaring at everybody else.
“They probably do have champagne if the guys in suits are here,” I said. “I’ll go and ask.”
The barmaid didn’t know at first if they had any. She disappeared, then came back and said yes. I didn’t have enough cash on me and had to write a cheque.
“I’ll bring it over,” she said.
When I came back, Greg was checking the call list on his mobile and Catherine was looking at the ceiling. They both focused on me now.
“It’s so incredible!” said Catherine.
“Yeah: well done,” said Greg.
“Marc Daubenay said that too,” I told him. “I didn’t do anything. Just got hit by a falling…falling stuff, you know. You’re the one who achieved something, getting hold of Daubenay. Greg found my lawyer for me,” I explained to Catherine. “You know, Greg, I’ll have to give you some commission on that, some kind of…”
“No! No way!” Greg held his hand up and turned his head away. “It’s all yours. Spend it on yourself. Yeah: what are you going to do with all that money?”
“I don’t know,” I told him. “I haven’t thought about it yet. What would you do?”
“I’d…well, I’d start an account with a coke dealer,” said Greg. “I’d tell him: here’s my bathtub, fill it with cocaine, then come back in a few days’ time and top it up until it’s full again, then same again a few days after that. And find me a girl with nice, firm tits to snort it off.”
“Hmm,” I said. I turned to Catherine and asked her: “What would you do?”
“It’s totally your call,” she said, “but if it were me I’d put money towards a resource fund.”
“Like savings?” I asked.
“No,” she said; “a resource fund. To help people.”
“Like those benevolent philanthropists from former centuries?” I asked.
“Well, sort of,” she said. “But it’s much more modern now. The idea is that instead of just giving people shit, the first world invests so that Africa can become autonomous, which saves the rich countries the cost of paying out in the future. Like, this fieldwork I’ve been doing in Zimbabwe: it’s all about supplying materials for education, health and housing, stuff like that. When they’ve got that, they can start moving to a phase where they don’t need handouts any more. That Victorian model is self-perpetuating.”
“An eternal supply,” said Greg, “a magic fountain. And I’d tell him to find another girl with a rock-solid ass so I could snort the coke off that when I’d got tired of snorting it off the first girl’s tits.”
“You think I should invest in development in Africa, then, rather than here?” I asked Catherine.
“Why not?” she said. “It’s all connected. All part of the same general, you know, caboodle. Markets are all global; why shouldn’t our conscience be?”
“Interesting,” I said. I thought of rails and wires and boxes, all connected. “But what do they, you know, do in Africa?”
“What do they do?” she repeated.
“Yeah,” I said. “Like, when they’re just doing their daily thing. Walking around, at home: stuff like that.”
“Strange question,” she said. “They do a million different things, like here. Right now, building is very big in Zimbabwe. There’s loads of people pulling homes together.”
Just then the barmaid arrived with the champagne bottle and three glasses. She asked me if I wanted her to open it.
“I’ll do it,” I said. I wrapped my fingers round the top, trying to penetrate the foil cover with my nails. It was difficult: my nails weren’t sharp enough, and the foil was thicker than I’d thought.
“Here, use my keys,” said Greg.
I wrapped my fingers round his set of keys. Catherine and Greg watched me. I moved my hand back to the champagne bottle’s top, made an incision in the foil, then pinched the broken flap and started pulling it back, slowly peeling the foil off.
“Shall I help?” Catherine asked.
“No,” I said. “I can do it.”
“Sure,” she said. “I didn’t mean…you know, whatever.”
I peeled the foil right off and was about to start untwisting the wire around the cork when I realized we still had our beers.
“We should knock these off first,” I said.
Greg and I started gulping our pints down.
“Whole villages are getting housing kits,” said Catherine. “These big, semi-assembled homes, delivered on giant trucks. They just pull them up and hammer them together.”
“And they all slot in just like that?” I asked her. “Without hitch?”
“They’re well-designed,” she said.
Greg set down his beer and burped. “There’s a party this Saturday,” he said. “David Simpson. You know David Simpson, right?”
I nodded. I knew him vaguely.
“Well, he’s just bought a flat on Plato Road, off Acre Lane. Just round the corner from here. He’s having a house-warming party Saturday, and you’re invited. Both of you.”
“Okay,” I said.
I gulped the last of my beer and started on the wire around the cork. It was a pipe-cleaner wire frame, like the frame beneath those dresses eighteenth-century ladies wore. I had to pinch it between my fingers and twist it. I managed this and started working the cork with my thumbs, but it wouldn’t go.
“Let me try,” Greg said.
I handed it to him, but he couldn’t do it either.
“You have to…” Catherine began, but just then the cork flew out with a bang. It only missed my head by half an inch. It hit a metal light clamped to the ceiling and then fell back to the floor.
“Woah!” said Greg. “You could have had your accident all over again. If that light had fallen on you, I mean.”
“I suppose so,” I said.
“Do the honours, then,” said Greg.
I poured the champagne and we drank. It wasn’t very cold, and it had a weird smell, like cordite. Catherine still had two glasses on the go, the champagne and the beer. She alternated, taking sips from each.
“You could do both,” said Greg.
“I’m sorry?” I said.
“Live like a rock star and give to these housing projects in Kenya. It’s enough money to do both.”
“ Zimbabwe,” Catherine said. “Yeah but it’s not just housing. Housing is a vital aspect, but there’s education too. And health.”
“Hey,” Greg said, “did I tell you about the time I took coke with this rock band? I was with this…”
He stopped and looked up. Catherine and I looked up too. Greg had stopped because the weird guy who’d been on his own had shuffled over to beside our table and was glaring at us. We looked back at him. He shifted his gaze from one of us to the other, then on to the table and the champagne bottle, then to nowhere in particular. Eventually he spoke:
“Where does it all go?”
Catherine turned away from him. Greg asked him:
“Where does what all go?”
The weird guy gestured vaguely at the table and the bottle.
“That,” he said.
“We drink it,” Greg answered. “We have digestive systems.”
The weird guy pondered that, then tssked.
“No. I don’t mean just that,” he said. “I mean everything. You people don’t think about these things. Give me a glass of that stuff.”
“No,” said Greg.
The weird guy tssked again, turned round and walked away. Other people were trickling into the bar. Music started playing.
“Does this champagne smell of cordite to you?” I asked.
“What?” said Greg.
“Cordite,” I said, raising my voice above the music.
“Cordite?” Greg said, raising his voice too. “What does cordite smell like?”
“This,” I answered.
“I don’t think so,” Greg said. “But look: that time, I was with this friend-well, with this guy I knew-and he played in a band, and…”
“What time?” Catherine asked. She’d finished her first glass of champagne and had poured herself another.
“When I took coke with this band,” Greg told her. “We all went in a van, to an after-gig party. It was somewhere up in Kentish Town, Chalk Farm. There were-hang on…” He poured himself another glass as well. “There were…”
“Wait,” I said. “Say I were to give towards this reserve fund…”
“Resource,” Catherine corrected me.
“Yeah, right,” I said. “Well, could I…I mean, how would I fit in?”
“Fit in?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “How am I connected to it all? Do I need to go there? Even if I don’t, could I go anyway, and watch?”
“Maybe you could take the virgin with the firmest ass as collateral,” said Greg. “And then another with the firmest tits as interest on your investment. Then, each time you snort a line off her: bingo! instant connection.”
“Why do you need to see it?” Catherine said. “Isn’t just knowing it’s happening good enough?”
“No,” I said. “Well, maybe. But I’d need…” I felt a kind of vertigo. I knew what I meant but couldn’t say it right. I wanted to feel some connection with these Africans. I tried to picture them putting up houses from her housing kits, or sitting around in schools, or generally doing African things, like maybe riding bicycles or singing. I didn’t know: I’d never been to Africa, any more than I-or Greg-had ever taken cocaine. I tried to visualize a grid around the earth, a kind of ribbed wire cage like on the champagne bottle, with lines of latitude and longitude that ran all over, linking one place to another, weaving the whole terrain into one smooth, articulated network, but I lost this image among disjoined escalator parts, the ones I’d seen at Green Park earlier. I wanted to feel genuinely warm towards these Africans, but I couldn’t. Not that I felt cold or hostile. I just felt neutral.
“Well, anyhow,” said Catherine. “That’s what I’d do. But that’s just me. It all depends on what you feel will give you the greatest, you know…”
Her voice trailed off. Greg came back in with his cocaine story. Then they went on to talking about Africa, where Greg had been once, on some safari. This led them back after a while to arguing about what I should do with my new fortune; then they truced up and chatted about Africa again. We went on in this vein for quite some time. The whole damn evening, probably. It went round in cycles, over the same ground again and again. I zoned out after a while. I knew already that I had no desire either to build schools in some country I’d never been to or to live like a rock idol. The Dogstar filled up and the music got louder and louder, so that Catherine and Greg had to shout to make themselves heard. And shout they did. We had another bottle of champagne and three more beers. They ended up quite drunk. I felt stone-cold sober the whole night.
Catherine and I left Greg outside the bar and walked back to my flat. I had to pull the sofa in the living room out into a bed for her. It was fiddly, finicky: you had to hook this bit round that bit while keeping a third bit clear. I hadn’t done it before we went out-deliberately, in case the extra bed wouldn’t be needed. But it was needed. Catherine had already begun to annoy me. I preferred her absence, her spectre.