rode on the top of the London Eye, pretending he was risking his life – just like he is now, apparently – but he was actually wearing a harness, all the while. In terms of inductive knowledge – i.e. basing your views on what’s gone before – Blaine’s looking like a pretty poor bet to all those cynical Outsiders down here.)
Seems like the need for real ‘truth’ (whatever that is, in the bleak-seeming aftermath of the Iraqi war) has – at some weird level – become almost a kind of modern mania. Perhaps without even realising, this loopy illusionist has tapped into something. Something big. A fury. A disillusionment. A post-disillusionment (almost). He personifies this sour mood, this sense of all-pervasive bafflement. And he’s American. And what’s even more perplexing is that he’s starting – with the dark skin, the beard growth and everything – to look a tad, well, like an Arab.
He’s the ally and the enemy (which, either way, symbolically, is pretty bad news for the guy).
So is this thing real?
Is it an illusion?
He can’t lie, people are thinking, he’s transparent. And he’s moving. He’s there. He’s not a puppet, an imposter or a hologram. But how can we be sure? How can we possibly believe in a person whose very career (their wealth, their celebrity) is entirely based on casual deception? Even if we wanted to? Even if we needed to? How?
How?
The Haters
Now the way I’m seeing it, these certifiable anger-balls are standing way outside more than just one restrictive cordon. They’re outside Blaine’s world (that’s for sure), and almost (I said almost) outside the world of social acceptability (alongside the truant, the graffiti artist, the petty-criminal and the football hooligan). They live inside a tabloid feeding frenzy, where everything’s in bold and italics and capital letters –
FUUUUUCK! RUN, TONE. MATE! RUUUUN!!
They’re that tiny, violent, whistling and juddering release button on society’s pressure cooker. They’re serving a function. They’re expressing what Solomon might resignedly call ‘the Dionysian’. And they are plump with rage. They are bloated with self-righteousness. They stand tall and replete, in a world stuffed to its well-fed gills with jealousy and distrust and hatred and terror.
(Man, we’re living in the degenerate West – so where’s all this shit even coming from?)
The Haters are standing outside a fair few circles, in other words, and inside a lot of others…But you know what? You know what? Wherever the hell it is they’re currently situated, it seems pretty damn crowded in there.
So you’d better, uh…
Duck!
Wow.
Wow!
Damn good shot.
I don’t see her again for two whole days. Then I’m wandering out of the office, mid-morning, to buy myself a packet of Lockets (sore throat – too much cheap herb the night before) when I see her, sitting on one of the two benches (I didn’t mention the benches yet, did I? Well they’re situated at the base of the bridge, side-on to the embankment wall, slightly out of the way; and while the view of Blaine isn’t all it might be from here – because of the angles, etc – he’s still moderately visible from this particular corner).
She has her plastic bag with her, full of Tupperware (but of course), and she’s wearing what appears to be a bleached-denim shirtwaister (which looks disturbingly like last season’s last season Marks and Spencer), a neat, tiny, chiffon-style scarf at her throat, some round, pearly-grey Jackie O earrings…and her shoes? Platforms. Like the kind which almost did for Baby in Spiceworld. Grey suede. Square toed. With an obscene burgundy flower covering the buckle.
She has nice ankles, actually. But a thick midriff (too thick, if you ask me, for that pinched-in kind of frock). Skin slightly too pale for a brunette, but her arms are pretty. Plump but shapely. Hair looks good – short and shiny (smooth, in general, but enlivened by a good bit of modern chop at her nape).
A plain girl (no getting around it – eyes the shade of a city pigeon, haughty nose – sensitive nostrils – and a full lower lip, but a too-tiny upper one). Past her prime (must be thirty-two, at least – thirty-four?), but with an interesting kind of solidity, a creaminess, a half-absent quality (a washed-out, much-lived-in well-fedness that’s strangely hard to resist…I mean, for a boy-whore, anyway).
So what do I do? Avoid? Approach? Mollify? Threaten? Be cute? Make a joke? Get sarcastic?
She’s boredly reading an article from a broadsheet paper (just a page – and the article is folded over, as if it’s been stored in somebody’s pocket). I glance to her right. A man is sitting next to her, also in his thirties; square-set, ruddy-cheeked, chaotic-looking, with slightly-thinning, coarse-seeming, strawberry blond hair, wearing old combat trousers and an extremely ancient, well-ripped ‘Punk’s Not Dead’ T-shirt underneath a proper shirt made out of musty-looking black moleskin.
Are they (by any chance) ‘together’?
I walk straight over.
‘Headache gone?’ I ask.
Her eyes don’t even flip up.
‘Migraine,’ she hisses.
‘Migraine gone?’ I ask.
‘Uh-huh,’ she says.
I begin to say something else (something very witty, in actual fact) and she raises a curt hand to silence me.
‘Reading,’ she barks.
The hand is held high, and then retained aloft, to stop me (I presume) from moving angrily off.
Punk’s Not Dead sneers, superciliously.
‘Punk is Dead,’ I say, ‘and that’s exactly the reason why they designed that T-shirt.’
His superciliousness transmogrifies into pity, as he quietly surveys my immaculately well-thought-out look (60 per cent Marc Jacobs, 40 per cent Issey Miyake).
‘Nice,’ he eventually murmurs. Oooh. Cutting.
Aphra finishes reading and glances up. She stares at me, blankly. ‘So who the hell are you?’ she asks.
‘Adair MacKenny,’ I stutter (falling – but only momentarily – a little off my stride). ‘I kindly took you home when you were ill the other day,’ I continue, in tones of determined affability, ‘was extremely late back to work as a result, and subsequently received a rather nasty formal reprimand for my crimes.’
(So
