Iain Sinclair - Millennium People

Laptop under my arm, I closed the front door behind me. I stared for a last time at the wooden panelling, and in the smooth enamel saw a window move and catch the sun. An open casement swung on the top floor of the apartment building beside Cadogan Circle. Bizarrely, a hand reached out and cleaned the panes, shook a duster and then withdrew.

I stepped into the street and walked towards the apartments, passing a burnt-out Saab sitting in its long-term bay. Were squatters moving into Chelsea Marina, giving up their soft drugs and hard mattresses? Were they ready to try a new lifestyle, to face the problems of school fees and Brazilian daily helps, ballet classes and BUPA subscriptions? Our modest revolution would become part of the folkloric calendar, to be celebrated along with the last night of the Proms and the Wimbledon tennis fortnight.

Pressing the handkerchief to my palm, I pumped the elevator buttons in the hall of the apartment building. Frustratingly, all electric power to Chelsea Marina had been disconnected. I climbed the stairs, resting on each landing, surrounded by the open doors of abandoned apartments, an actor searching for the right stage set. I was light-headed when I reached the top floor. Without thinking, I pushed back the unlocked door and stared across the empty living room at the window that had swung in the sunlight.

A third-floor tenant of the same apartment house, Vera Blackburn, was a former government scientist and a close friend of Kay Churchill’s. I remembered that the top-floor flat was owned by a young optician and her husband. The living-room windows had the clearest views in Chelsea Marina, looking down Beaufort Avenue along the route that the Home Secretary would take on his inspection tour.

I stepped over a discarded suitcase and entered the room. A blue canvas bag lay on the desk, its side embossed with the seal of the Metropolitan Police, part of the equipment carried by riot-control teams. Inside would be stun guns, canisters of tear gas and the cattle prods with which the police defended themselves against their ever-present enemies.

The laptop had grown more heavy in my hand, a half-conscious warning signal. I could hear two people speaking in the nearby bedroom, a man’s curt but low tones and a woman’s sharper replies. I assumed that a police constable and a woman colleague were keeping watch on the Home Secretary’s approach. Methodical to a fault, they had wiped the windows to give themselves the clearest view possible of the Cabinet Minister and his sagely nodding advisers. Finding me in their observation post, they would assume the worst, and soon decide that a psychologist’s laptop was a potentially offensive weapon.

Trying not to trip over the suitcase, I edged towards the door, aware for the first time of the optician’s diagrams pinned to the wall above the desk, target-like circles and rows of meaningless letters that resembled coded messages.

The bedroom door opened and a distracted man in a shabby suit stepped into the living room. The sun was behind him, but I could see his undernourished face, and the light flaring off his high temples. He noticed me, but seemed preoccupied with a problem of his own, as if I were a patient who had called at his surgery without an appointment. He stared through the window at the empty streets and fire-damaged houses with the tired gaze of an overworked doctor trying to carry out his medical work in a wartorn Middle East suburb.

At last he turned to me, smiling with a sudden show of warmth.

‘David? Come in. We’ve all been waiting for you.’

Despite myself, I knew that I was eager to see him.

MY SEDUCTION BY Dr Richard Gould, and the revolution he launched at Chelsea Marina, began only four months earlier, though I often felt that I had known this disgraced children’s doctor since my student years. He was the maverick who attended no lectures and sat no exams, a solitary with an unpressed suit and a syllabus of his own, but who managed to move on to a postgraduate degree and a successful professional career. He came into our lives like a figure from one of tomorrow’s dreams, a stranger who took for granted that we would become his most devoted disciples.

A telephone call was our first warning of Gould’s arrival. My mobile rang as we were leaving for Heathrow Airport and a three-day conference of industrial psychologists in Florida. I was steering Sally down the staircase and assumed the call was one of those last-minute messages from the Institute designed to unsettle my flight across the Atlantic – the resignation of a valued secretary, the news that a much-liked colleague had gone into rehab, an urgent e-mail from a company chairman who had discovered Jung’s theory of archetypes and was convinced that it outlined the future of kitchenware design.

I left Sally to answer the phone while I took our suitcases into the hall. A natural mender and healer, she had the knack of making everyone feel better. Within minutes the check-in queues at Heathrow would melt away, and the Atlantic would smooth itself into a dance floor. I stood outside the front door and scanned the crescent for our hire car. A few taxis penetrated into this quiet turning off the Abbey Road, but were soon commandeered by Beatles fans making their pilgrimage to the recording studios, or by well-lunched MCC members swaying from Lord’s cricket ground into the unsettling world beyond pad and crease. I had booked the car to arrive two hours before our Miami flight from Terminal 3, but the usually reliable Mr Prashar was already twenty minutes late.

Sally was still on the phone when I returned to the sitting room. She leaned against the mantelpiece, smoothing her shoulder-length hair with a casual hand, as handsome as an actress in a thirties Hollywood film. Mirrors held their breath around Sally.

‘So…’ She switched off the phone. ‘We wait and hope.’

‘Sally? Who was that? Not Professor Arnold, please…’

Gripping a walking stick in each hand, Sally swayed from the mantelpiece. I stepped back, as always humouring her little fantasy that she was handicapped. Only the previous afternoon she had played ping-pong with a colleague’s wife, sticks forgotten on the table as she batted the ball to and fro. She had not needed the sticks for months, but still reached for them at moments of stress.

‘Your friend Mr Prashar.’ She leaned against me, scented scalp pressed to my cheek. ‘There’s a problem at Heathrow. Tailbacks as far as Kew. He thinks there’s no point in leaving until they clear.’

‘What about the flight?’

‘Delayed. Nothing’s taking off. The whole airport is down.’

‘So what do we do?’

‘Have a large drink.’ Sally pushed me towards the liquor cabinet. ‘Prashar will ring in fifteen minutes. At least he cares.’

‘Right.’ As I poured two Scotch and sodas I glanced through the window at Sally’s car, with its fading disability sticker on the windscreen, wheelchair folded in the rear seat. ‘Sally, I can drive us there. We’ll take your car.’

‘Mine? You can’t cope with the controls.’

‘Dear, I designed them. I’ll use the hard shoulder, headlights, plenty of horn. We’ll leave it in the short-term car park. It’s better than sitting here.’

‘Here we can get drunk.’

Lying back on the sofa, Sally raised her glass, trying to revive me. The war of succession at the Adler, the struggle to replace Professor Arnold, had left me tired and scratchy, and she was keen to get me to the other side of the Atlantic. The conference at Celebration, Disney’s model community in Florida, was a useful chance to park an exhausted husband by a hotel swimming pool. Travelling abroad was an effort for her – the knee-jarring geometry of taxis and bathrooms, and the American psychologists who saw a glamorous woman swaying on her sticks as a special kind of erotic challenge. But Sally was always game, even if for much of the time her only company would be the minibar.