with that perverse crew any more than I have to. Of course, I am protected to some degree by my covert association with Colin Purves. He’s a worthy sort of chap – you know the kind – not that imaginative, a plodder really. He’s the only one of the eight of us who commutes. He lives down at Tunbridge Wells with his wife. (He probably refers to her as ‘my lady wife’ whilst propping up the saloon bar in the local pub.) He takes the eight-twenty-two to Charing Cross every morning and then crosses via the footbridge to his office on the South Bank. I believe he’s responsible (if that’s the right word – ‘responsibility’ seems slightly too grand) for the stationery purchasing of one department, of one division, of one subsidiary of a multi-national oil company.
Lucky for Purves – having a desk job. It means that like me he has an opportunity to keep close to him the London phone directories, and the computer discs that hold pirated copies of all the electoral registers for London’s constituencies. Of course, neither of us has to have the physical evidence of all the people we control to hand, oh no. It’s just that Purves – like myself – finds it somewhat easier to get to grips with the job if he has some kind of a record of these multiplying blips of sentience.
I like to hold the directory that contains the listing of the biggest chunk of the people I am manipulating at any given time. It gives me the feeling that I am in some sense holding them, caressing them, tweaking the strings that shift their little arms and little legs, their little mouths and little heads.
I don’t get out a lot any more. Tonight is an exception. It’s nice just to sit here in the snug of the pub and watch the people laughing and drinking. It amuses me to try and guess which of them belongs to whom. That horsey-looking woman, yes her, the strawberry blonde with the Hermes headscarf drinking a ginger-beer shandy. Well, you would have thought she’d have to be Lady Bob’s or the Recorder’s, hmm? Well, you’re wrong, she belongs to the Bollam sisters. I know, I know, but you see, look at the sides of her neck, there’s a certain unresolved tension there in the tendons. It’s ever so subtle, but it’s enough for me to be able to tell.
And the man who collects the glasses. All stooped over, with his drowned-rat beard, and that absurd mulberry-coloured quilted smoking jacket, the lapels of which are encrusted with silly badges. Lechmere’s. In fact, he’s one of Lechmere’s voyeurs. A particularly gruesome one, I should imagine. What’s that? You’re surprised it doesn’t make me paranoid having him here in my local . . . No, no, don’t be ridiculous, it matters not a jot. We comingle freely – all of us. There are some of the other’s people very close to me indeed. Couldn’t get any closer if they tried.
No, no, I used to work, but I gave up my job at the bookshop to look after my mother. She’s almost ninety now and quite bedridden. It’s a fairly quiet life that Mother and I have. There’s not a lot of money, but there are a lot of bedpans to empty. An exciting interlude for the two of us is a visit from the health visitor, or an extra sausage from the meals on wheels. I suppose you could say that Mother and I are close – perhaps too close. I can sometimes guess what she’s thinking just by looking at her. The other way round? No, I don’t think so. How can I put it, Mother is just a trifle déclassé, a tiny cut below myself. And anyway – she’s one of Dooley’s and that really scuppers it as far as I’m concerned.
It’s strange the way that we all appear to have different motivations. Dooley acting apparently out of capriciousness; the Bollam sisters out of some perverted religiosity; Lechmere trying to see everything; Purves with his desire for orderliness – directing many many thousands of his rather dull little men to wash their cars every Saturday morning, and mow their lawns every Sunday afternoon, without fail . . . As for the Recorder and Lady Bob, well I wouldn’t presume, but I think I can safely say that they have everyone’s best interests at heart.
And then there’s me. Acting, I would say, with absolute probity. Attempting to make sure that there is a kind of organic unity in London, that people have their right position and estate. It’s entirely appropriate that it should be me who fulfils this role; occupying, as I do, a sort of middle-to-upper-middle niche. I can look in both directions, up and down the social scale, and check that to the best of my abilities everybody is in his correct place.
If 212 ethnic minority local councillors throughout the capital are getting a tad stroppy, then I make it my business to ensure that they’re knocked down a peg or two. What exactly? We-ell, I might have their children arrested for drugs, something like that. And if there are 709 little Sloaney women who fancy they are about to get their name in some glossy magazine, then I’m on hand to make sure the proof readers make the correct error.
It can be still more subtle than this. In one blissful twenty-four-hour period, a month or so ago, I engineered it so that 45,902 of my people found themselves dropping the wrong name. Good, eh? I am good, good at the task in hand.
It’s not snobbery! I thought I told you that at the outset. I deplore snobbery and it constitutes no part of my motivation. I simply believe that there is a natural order of people just as there is of things. A kind of periodic table on to which every element within every person can be fitted.
Anyway, it’s not a responsibility that most people would be prepared to shoulder. It can be gruelling work and of course there is no reward to speak of.
Yes, sometimes I do get depressed, very low. When I’m really down it amuses me to toy with this notion: that one of the little people might discover the truth. Discover not only that their freedom is a delusion; but that, furthermore, instead of being the hapless tool of some great deity, shoved up on a towering Titian-type cloud, they are instead jerked this way and that by a pervert in Bloomsbury, or a dullard in the Shell Centre, or an old incontinent in Clapton. Ye-es, it would be droll.
I’m sorry? Yes, yes, that’s right, that’s what I was leading up to. When it gets too claustrophobic at home, when Mother’s rasping snore gets to me, and the old-woman smell of flannel, medicaments and cabbage is making me retch, I come here and engage someone like yourself in conversation. Someone bright, enquiring and interested. And then I do tell them – tell them everything.
What’s that? Yes, of course, you are perceptive; naturally I can do this with impunity, because you’ll never remember anything I’ve told you. It will depart from your tiny mind when we part. For as I told you at the outset: there are really only eight people in London. And whereas I am fortunately one of them – you are emphatically not.
The Indian Mutiny
I killed a man when I was at school. I’m not just saying that, I really did. And you know the fact of it has eaten away at me for years. Even now, sitting in my office at the station, in the dead centre of a dead ordinary day, I get chilly and sweaty thinking about it.
It was a shit thing to do, a truly bad thing. When I was growing up – after it had happened – I didn’t dwell on it that much. It wasn’t as if I had beaten the back of his head in with a spade and watched his brains run out like grey giblets, or poisoned him so that he died kicking and thrashing, or stabbed him, shot him, or hung him ejaculating and shirting from a spindly tree.
Don’t get me wrong – these aren’t my imaginings. I don’t visualise things like this. Like I say, when I was in my teens, my early twenties, I didn’t think of it as actually murdering someone. I read my behaviour differently, innocently.
He was my history teacher, I was his pupil. He had a mental breakdown one day, actually in the class, while he was taking a lesson. He was hospitalised, but we heard that he killed himself a couple of weeks later. Killed himself by suffocation.
Years later I heard that what he had done was to shut himself in a tiny
