thanks.’
Cameron lifted the receiver as Jim went off. He dialled TIM. ‘Pip. Pip. At the third stroke it will be nine thirty-five and ten seconds. Pip. Pip. Pip. At the third stroke it will be nine thirty-five and twenty seconds.’ The voice was cold, remote – talking marble. The pips were thawing ice. It was like being tuned in to the core of all erosion, the dripping of an unquenchable wound. When Jim patted his shoulder on the way back into the dining-room, Cameron was still listening blankly: . . . ‘it will be nine thirty-eight and forty seconds. Pip. Pip. Pip.’
He put down the receiver. He couldn’t face going back into the restaurant just yet to listen to their perfunctory voices. He wondered what Margaret was doing. Why couldn’t he be with her now, the curtains drawn, and only the two of them together, growing again into people in each other’s presence. It only needed one big, positive action to reorientate his life. To walk out now and drive to Margaret’s would be enough. He turned and made towards the door. The design of foliage on the carpet stretched before him like a jungle. The thick glass doors gave him back the hotel lobby as if the night outside was only an extension of this room. Voices came from the lounge-bar on his left and he turned desperately towards them, losing himself among them, knowing as he did so that the voice locked in the recesses of the phone was coldly deducting every second from his life.
The air of the lounge was meshed with smoke and every table was fortified by earnest talk against intrusion. Cameron saw a space at the bar beside a large balding man who stared into his drink as if he was angling it. Cameron won to the space and asked for a double whisky.
He couldn’t just walk out on Allison at a time like this. It wasn’t even practical. He was the only one with a housekey, for one thing. And he hadn’t paid his share of the bill. It was ridiculous how circumstances held the grandest intentions trapped like a staked bear while trivia snapped at it like terriers until they wore it into submission. Just when you were about to jump the moon, you tramped on your turnups.
‘Do you have any children?’
Cameron thought he was overhearing someone’s conversation and his glance was automatic. But it was at him that the large balding man was staring, his eyes muddied with drink. Cameron realised at once why there had been a space beside him at the bar. An aggressive gloom surrounded him like a railing.
‘Have you any children? I’ve got children.’
He was so drunk you could almost see each thought well to the surface of his eyes like a dead fish. Cameron decided that talk was the best method of defence.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ve got two.’
‘I’ve got children. I’ve got three children. Two daughters and a son. The boy’s only ten.’
Silence followed and Cameron began to think it was finished, that the big man had been concerned merely to deliver a brief bulletin on progeny.
‘How many children have you got?’
‘I’ve got two.’
‘See that they take their sugar.’
‘They always do. Plenty of it.’
‘Their polio sugar. The vaccine. See that they take it. They’ve got to take their sugar. Ralph was taking his. One lump to go. One bloody lump. And he got polio. Calliper. His leg’s no thicker than that.’ He held up a wavering forefinger. ‘That’s him for the rest of his life. The bastards. That’s a good break to give a boy. Because there was one lump to go. One lump of sugar between him and a full life.’
The big man’s massive futility swelled Cameron’s, towered into a wave that swamped him. Surfacing for a second, Cameron reached for the first thought that came to him, and said, ‘Do you want a drink?’
‘I don’t want your bloody drink.’
The big man’s face pitched close for a second and then receded into the distance of its private storm.
Cameron came out of the lounge and stood for a moment, as if he had lost his way. It wasn’t that he had been particularly moved by the big man’s dilemma. He even doubted that what he had heard was medically feasible. But it seemed to have a certain poetic truth. In the large, pulpy face he recognised the fist-marks of his own world. That’s what he was up against too – a world in which the omission of a sugarlump could wither your leg, where the infinite ways of losing nullified all the permutations of precaution. Each day chance was infiltrating its bacilli: brakes wore; blood clotted; feet slipped; smoke tarred the lungs; worries gnawed at the struts of the mind. Some time one or more of these would win. Meanwhile the calendars hung in rooms, icons of emptiness, computing coincidence. He felt years sifting away from him, and he was left with no more concrete measurement of their passing than the spaces in his diary, bleak tundras of paper on which survived a few skeletal facts, fragile as moth’s bones, crumbling to shapelessness in a month’s turning: ‘Remember shoes – collect’, ‘Sales conference’, ‘Helen’s birthday – doll – talking or dressing’, ‘See Auld’.
It isn’t me, he thought. None of it is me. Nor is any of this – Jim Forbes’s jokes, Morton’s complacency, Eileen’s sympathy. Yet he went on acting as if they were. For how long? Until Charlie Slade’s epitaph became his own? Pass round the conversation, boys, and put a sentence in. In memory of Eddie Cameron. No. He wasn’t finished yet, he told himself. It would be nice to know who you were before you died. He felt a need to hurry. But there was nowhere to hurry to. The rest of the evening waited for him, talk and jokes and drinks in a conspiracy of slow motion, designed to strangle his urgency. So, nursing his desperation like a time-bomb, he went back to them to become part of the conspiracy again, to nod and smile and not hear what was said.
The rest of the night drifted past him in a meaningless debris of aimless actions and fragments of conversation: the banter when he came back into the dining-room and Jim Forbes’s joke about its being a fine time to phone his fancy-woman, at which Morton didn’t laugh; the journey back home in the car (Jim and Eileen were travelling with them); tailors’ dummies in eerie conclave in bright windows, a cinema disgorging anonymous gobbets of humanity onto the street; Allison and Eileen talking brightly in the back, Jim intoning the respective merits of front-and back-wheel drive (banish technicalities from the language, and what would we find to talk about?), and Morton’s car following a yard from the back fender; thanking Mrs Davis from across the road for baby-sitting; giving out drinks; eating Allison’s delicate supper; giving out drinks.
They were using the living-room because it was warm from the fire kept on for Mrs Davis. Jim’s pleas to have the children brought out of their beds had been swiftly squashed by Allison.
The new cushion interested them, gave rise to jokes. Allison had only bought it the other day. It sat on the settee, too big for it. Too big to be a cushion, really. A hybrid form. As if a car-seat had been crossed with a mattress. And this was their scion. A luxurious deformity.
‘Chinese?’ Forbes was asking.
Because of the huge dragon depicted on it. Did that make it Chinese? Do the Chinese have a monopoly on dragons?
‘Japanese. Naturally,’ Morton pronounced.
Thank you, Morton, san. Purveyor of Culture to Ignorant Masses.
‘Here’s how you should really use it.’
Morton put the cushion on the floor, pulled up his trouser-legs, and squatted cross-legged, his hands inside his jacket-sleeves.
‘All
