Jonathan Coe - The Dwarves of Death

‘He thinks it would be a good idea if we all got together and had a talk.’

‘Fine.’

‘Sunday lunchtime, at The White Goat.’

‘Fine.’

‘I’ll call Martin and tell him, shall I?’

Harry and Jake decided to go to the kebab shop, but I couldn’t face it. I got a bus back from Borough High Street and managed to persuade the driver to let me bring the keyboard on. The bus only took me to within half a mile of the flat, so I had to walk the rest of the way; with a few pauses for sitting down and getting my breath back, I was able to do it in about twenty minutes. I didn’t even meet any winos or kids this time, although there seemed to be some kind of trouble going on in the chip shop. These two blokes had got the owner up against the wall. It looked as if they were trying to rob the till or something. I didn’t feel like getting involved.

I arrived back at the flat and was about to turn the television on, thinking that there might be an Open University programme worth watching, when I noticed that the green light was flashing on our answering machine. There were no messages for me, though. It was Pedro again.

‘Hola, Tina, it’s only me, ringing to find out how are you feeling, my little dumpling. You know, you shouldn’t have upset me by crying like that and calling me names, especially names like that which I’m surprised to be known to a lady of your persuasion. Anyway, I hope you’re feeling better and I suppose I’m sorry about what happened last night, I suppose I got a little bit carried off, and I hope I didn’t hurt you or things like that. You know, in Spain, men and women, we do things like this all the time, but maybe you English ladies are a bit less uninhabited. Anyway, I’ll come around tonight again, if you still want to see me, and maybe we can pick things up where we got off. OK?’

There was a long pause.

‘I’m sorry.’

The machine clicked off.

Nobody, absolutely nobody who had any real choice in the matter, would choose to spend Sunday morning on a council estate in South East London. Waking up in the morning and staring at the damp patch in the ceiling of your bedroom, a brief vision passes through your mind of all the beautiful places in the world, all the different places where you could have found yourself, and you realize that somebody, somewhere, has seriously miscalculated. The sun is shining. It’s a fine, crisp, wintry morning. You have two options. You can either lie in bed all day, and try to forget where you are, or you can get up, and get out — it doesn’t matter where, just some place that doesn’t make you feel quite so suicidally depressed. All over the estate, people must be thinking these thoughts; in every single flat, there must be people planning their escape. You’d have thought, wouldn’t you, that there would be a mass exodus from the Herbert Estate every Sunday morning, that the streets would be thronged with desperate men, women and children making a concerted bid for freedom. But it doesn’t happen. Nobody moves. Everybody stays put. Do you know why?

Because there are no fucking buses, that’s why.

It’s not that there aren’t meant to be buses, of course. Somewhere, perhaps hidden away in some long-forgotten vault or archive, there must be a timetable telling you when and where these buses are supposed to run. There is even a little panel on the side of the bus-stop, where this timetable is supposed to be posted, although the timetable itself is never there. I think London Transport employs vandals specifically to tear down its timetables within seconds of putting them up, so that people have no idea when the buses are meant to run and can’t complain about them never appearing. Standing at a bus-stop on a Sunday morning is like going to church: it’s an act of faith, an expression of irrational belief in something which you dearly want to believe exists, even though you have never seen it with your own eyes.

At first you are the only person at the bus-stop. You have allowed several hours for your journey and you feel stupidly optimistic. You whistle a tune. Twenty minutes go by, and then a bus comes, but it’s out of service. Never mind, these are early days yet. An old man joins you at the bus-stop, and asks you if you have been waiting long. You say, about twenty minutes. He nods and lights up a cigarette. You begin to make anagrams out of the words in the advertisements posted up on the other side of the road. You count all the windows in the block of flats to your right. Another twenty minutes go by, and you are beginning to grow impatient. Your foot has started tapping. The old man has finished his cigarette, given up and disappeared. Your legs are beginning to ache, and you shift your weight from one to the other restlessly. Just behind you is a little shop, and the owner, a Cypriot, is standing in the doorway looking at you with this infuriating beatific, knowing smile on his face. He is smiling because he knows — and so do you, although you dare not articulate it to yourself — that your ordeal has barely started yet.

More time passes. You have stopped whistling and you’ve run out of anagrams. You keep looking at your watch: so often, that you know the time it is going to tell you almost to the very second. More people join you at the bus-stop. Some of them give up after a few minutes, and walk on. By now, however hard you try to fight against it, hollow, tearful despair is beginning to well up inside you. An old, old woman goes past, muttering to herself and pulling a little trolley full of dirty washing. You hate her. You hate her because you know that you will be seeing her again. Even though she is walking at the rate of a mile a century, you know that she will have time to go down to the launderette, do three loads of washing, call in on her sister for Sunday lunch, eat the whole meal, wash up, watch the omnibus edition of EastEnders and walk all the way back before the next bus comes. You start thinking of all the things you could have done in the time you have been waiting for this bus. You start adding up all the hours in your life spent waiting for buses that never came. The whole, sorry history of mankind, the entire catalogue of human suffering and misery, seems suddenly crystallized in this futile activity. It makes you want to cry.

By now quite a crowd has gathered at the bus-stop. People are sitting on the pavement, shivering, with their heads in their hands; women are breast-feeding their babies; small children are wailing and moaning and running around in distracted circles. It’s like a scene from a refugee camp. And you are also incredibly hungry. The little Cypriot shop behind you is still open, and you wonder whether you should perform an act of charity, because it is within your power to put all these people out of their misery. Because you know that if you step inside that shop, just for thirty seconds, to buy a bar of chocolate, a bus will immediately come around the corner, and it will have gone again by the time you get outside. There is absolutely no doubt in your mind about this. But at the same time you can’t help wondering if it might be worth taking the risk: given that the bus will appear, not immediately when you enter the shop, but at the precise moment when you hand over your money to the shopkeeper — mightn’t there still be time for you to collect the change, run outside and leap on the bus? It’s worth a try. So you go inside, and you choose a bar of chocolate, and the Cypriot shopkeeper has gone to lunch and left his eight-year-old son to look after the till, and you hand over a fifty-pence piece, and glance anxiously out of the window, and the bus has come, and the little Cypriot boy is scratching his head because he doesn’t have the faintest idea how to subtract twenty-four from fifty, and you shout ‘Twenty-six! Twenty-six!’, and he opens the till but there are no ten — or twenty-pence pieces, and he slowly begins counting the whole thing out in coppers, and you look out of the window and see that the last person is just getting on to the bus, and you shout, ‘Forget it, kid, forget it!’, and run outside just as the bus is pulling away, and the driver sees you but he doesn’t stop for you, because he’s a complete and utter bastard.