Russell Hoban: Mr Rinyo-Clacton's Offer

At home I found that some things were no longer possible; I put on one of our favourite Purcell tracks, ‘Musick for a while’, sung by Michael Chance, and not only did it not all my cares beguile, it made me want to jump out of a window. Most of our music collection was now nothing I could listen to.

Post addressed to Jonathan Fitch came through my letter-box and that was who I was. I had a National Insurance number and an account at Lloyds; I had a shoe size and a blood type and a bunch of keys. I was twenty-eight years old and not too bad-looking; in the past, when things came to an end with a woman, I’d always been able to find someone new. But now that Serafina was gone I realised too late that I was possessed by her — I had no self to offer anyone else. The house of my self is built on a rock of panic. Now the house was gone and only the panic remained.

My mind sorted desperately through its souvenirs of Serafina: her voice; her body; her potato pancakes. The look of her as she stretched to water the Russian vine; the slanty smile she gave me with the sunlight through the leaves haloing her hair. Destiny! That was the word that kept repeating itself in my head, and I remembered our beginning.

Four years ago I went into the Vegemania for the first time, through a little hallway where a bulletin board offered several kinds of yoga and meditation, International Healing Tao, Creative Movement and Dance Improvisation, shiatsu, acupuncture, full body massage, rooms to let, vans for sale, Urdu tuition, and recorder lessons.

The Vegemania Restaurant and Whole Food Shop was in Earl’s Court Road between a bureau de change and a one-hour photographic service. The place was full of sunlight (particularly bleak that day), stripped pine, and blackboards with the menu written in a bold round hand. I sat down facing the window with a view of the street and passers by, all of whom seemed to be free of any fixed routine and with better places to go than I. Many of them were strapped and belted into great bulging rucksacks that they bore effortlessly and most of them carried plastic bottles of mineral water that sparkled in the sun as if they’d been filled at the Fountain of Youth.

Not that I was old — I was only twenty-four back then — it was just that the man in the Excelsior logo was so much further out of his rock than I was. The first video in the Excelsior Starter Kit began with Dr Gunther Rumpel, our consultant psychologist, fixing the viewer with a steely blue eye and saying, ‘Be honest. In the matter of realising your potential, how would you grade yourself on a scale from one to ten?’ At that time I had no idea how to grade myself because I hadn’t yet worked out what my potential was.

Since university I’d had two jobs before Excelsior and been sacked from both. At Harmattan Academic Press I’d made myself redundant by differing with Dr Auguste Birnaud on seventeen points in his Hermetic Modes of Semiosis in the Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke; my next job was writing copy at Folsom & Deere Advertising which lasted until a client meeting with Big Boy candy bars in which I suggested the line, ‘Get your mouth around a Big Boy’. Shortly after that I answered an ad with the headline ‘REALISE YOUR POTENTIAL’ and I became part of Excelsior.

It was lunchtime and the Vegemania was filling up with hungry people and the healthy smells of wholefood cuisine. I was looking at a blackboard and trying to decide whether I wanted tofu-fried tortellini with carbonara sauce and a green salad or tagliolini with pesto and sun-dried tomatoes when I became aware of a new smell that made the others fade to nothing. This smell was in its crispy golden-brownness the ultimate expression of the art of frying; it was earthy and transcendental, seductive and spiritual. I had to swallow my saliva before I could speak. ‘What is that smell?’ I asked the waitress.

‘Sorry about that,’ she said. ‘The extractor fan’s quit on us.’

‘Please don’t be sorry, just tell me what it is.’

‘Potato pancakes.’ She pointed to the blackboard where they were listed, served with sour cream and apple sauce, for £3.50.

Potatoes! Growing in the earth, achieving self-realisation underground, waiting to be dug up. ‘That’s what I’ll have, please,’ I said.

In due course they appeared, three of them crispy and golden-brown on a white plate with a blue-and-gold border. Two little tubs as well, one with sour cream and one with apple sauce. The pancakes tasted more than good; they tasted of destiny: I knew that I had come to a time and a place that had been waiting for me. The sunlight seemed less bleak and my plate was empty.

As she cleared my place the waitress, a tall blonde all in black with a very short skirt, said, ‘How were they?’

‘Great. Same again, please.’ I waited, feeling the thing build. This time I turned in my chair and saw a woman appear in the kitchen doorway. She had her black hair tucked up inside a scarf but a few wisps escaped. She was wearing a white apron over her jeans and jumper. She was only there for a moment, then her absence became the single event in the room — nothing else was happening. I tried to see her face again in my mind: a long face, beautiful and intense and concentrated as if trying to remember something. Three more potato pancakes appeared with sour cream and apple sauce, then once again my plate was empty.

‘Had enough?’ said the waitress.

I belched quietly behind my napkin. ‘Do it again, please,’ I said.

The third order of potato pancakes was brought to me by the cook herself. She gave me that concentrated look, smiled slantily, and said, ‘Nice juicy potatoes this time of year.’

I smelled her sweat that had in it fear and desire and frying. ‘Today is the beginning,’ I said.

‘Of what?’

‘Everything.’

And it was.

Serafina and I usually woke up facing away from each other, and the first thing I always did on coming out of sleep was reach behind me to lay a hand on her hip. Then the day could begin.

But this was the morning after Mr Rinyo-Clacton; when I reached behind me there was no Serafina, the October sunlight was coming through the blinds and the desolation and dread that were always waiting rushed in on me. The events of last night insisted on being real and not a dream and I was no longer sure who or what I was — it was as if I was clinging to a tuft of grass on the face of a cliff and the grass was coming away in my hands. I’d sat on the floor in Piccadilly Circus tube station and now here I was, dangling over empty air.

I rang up Chelsea & Westminster Hospital. ‘Where do I go for an HIV test?’ I asked.

‘The John Hunter Clinic,’ said the man at the switchboard. ‘It’s just next door to us.’ He gave me the number.

‘I think I need an HIV test,’ I said when the John Hunter Clinic came on the line.

‘What sort of risk factor are we talking about?’ said the man at the other end.

For a moment I thought he wanted some kind of number, then the penny dropped. Despite my sore bum, I tried to be as refined as he was. ‘I might have been exposed last night,’ I said. ‘It was the first and only contact of that kind I’ve ever had.’

‘It’s too soon for anything to show up in a test —’ he said, ‘there’s a three-month window.’

‘A three-month window!’ I imagined the ledge of that window; looking down past my feet I saw the street far, far below, where tiny faces looked up expectantly. Some of them shouted, ‘What are you waiting for?’

‘Three months! I’ve got to wait three months before I know anything?’