Russell Hoban: Mr Rinyo-Clacton's Offer

‘That’s right. We’ll be happy to test you at any time before that but it won’t be conclusive. We can test you for other sexually transmitted diseases such as gonorrhoea and herpes simplex and so on and we can give you counselling. Our walk-in clinic is open every day from eight-thirty to four-thirty except Wednesday when we open at eleven-thirty.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, and rang off. Counselling! That’s what I should have had before I started shaping my destiny in strange beds. Three months! I had no appetite for breakfast but I forced myself to have my usual grapefruit juice, muesli, and coffee. The sky was grey, the day looked doubtful and unsure of its potential as I set out for the Excelsior office, only a few minutes from where I live in Nevern Place. On the way I stopped at the Vegemania: it wasn’t open yet and nobody was visible through the window. Where was Serafina staying? She’d no place of her own any more. Was there already someone else waking up beside her?

I still wasn’t ready for Excelsior but I didn’t want to be alone so I crossed the road and went on to the tube station. With a sinking feeling in my stomach and a tingling at the back of my neck I moved through the human swarm that poured out into Earl’s Court Road. Where were they going, that they were all in such a hurry? Not just the young with their rucksacks and mineral water but middle-aged and old people as well, all with places to go that they were eager to get to. A young man at the entrance gave me a handbill:

****KATERINA ****

MODERN PSYCHIC AND CLAIRVOYANT

No crystal ball, no bullshit. This is the real thing.

You pay nothing if I can’t help you.

**********

There was no address but the telephone number was a local one. Who knows? I thought. Maybe this is part of my destiny too. I stuck the handbill in my pocket, turned back towards Benjy’s, picked up a takeaway coffee and a Danish, walked back to the corner, turned left into Kenway Road, continued past Al-Rawshi Take Away Lebanese Cuisine, Launderama, Hi-Tide Fish & Chips, and other international enterprises, opened the hallway door at Long Trail Travel, slowly climbed the stairs to Excelsior, said good morning to my colleagues Phil and Gary, both of whom observed that I looked terrible. I checked the first name on my list, and dialled the number.

‘Hello,’ said the voice at the other end.

‘Hello,’ I said. ‘Am I speaking to Herbert Sledge?’

‘Yes. Who is this?’ He sounded young and short on patience.

‘My name is Jonathan Fitch, Mr Sledge, and I’m with the Excelsior Corporation. We’ve got a list of people with potential and you’re on it.’

‘Get to the point. What are you selling?’

‘Our database shows that eighty-three per cent of the people in your age and socio-economic bracket realise only between forty and sixty per cent of their personal potential. Of that eighty-three per cent …’

‘Stop,’ said Sledge. ‘You sound like an educated man, Mr Fitch. How old are you?’

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘You don’t want to answer the question, do you.’

‘I’m twenty-eight.’

‘I’m twenty-four and I’m Head of Genetic Research at Omni Laboratories. Right now I’m investigating hierarchal language analogues in non-coding DNA. What are you doing besides peddling some bullshit self-improvement course?’

‘We can’t all be investigating non-coding DNA,’ I said, feeling an upsurge of gastric acid. ‘Some of us have to sell bullshit self-improvement courses.’

Sanjay Prasad walked in just as I said that: my boss, owner of Excelsior Corporation, Long Trail Travel, Prasad Printing and Copying Services, and Kashmiri Garden Furnishings. Gold Rolex, blue and white striped shirt with a white collar, and some really awful aftershave. ‘That’s quite an original sales approach,’ he said. ‘I hope you have a lot of luck with it at your next place of employment.’

‘I have to go now,’ I said to Herbert Sledge. ‘It’s been great fun talking to you. Have a nice DNA.’

‘See Yasmin in Accounting downstairs,’ said Sanjay, looking at his watch. ‘She will settle up with you.’

‘Are you telling me this is goodbye? I’ve consistently scored more sign-ups than anyone else in this room.’

‘I know. This isn’t business, it’s personal — I just happen to hate your guts. You read Classics at university and you think what we do here is shit.’

‘Don’t you?’

‘No, I do not. Our files are full of letters from clients who tell us that their lives are better in every way because of the Excelsior Self-Realisation Programme. The difference between you and me is that you’re slumming and you think in a slumming way whereas I am an honest man selling an honest service and I take pride in what I’m doing. Maybe you should sign up for the course; I’ll even give you a discount although you’re no longer an employee. I’m serious — I think it would help you.’

‘I’m deeply moved by your concern, Sanjay, but I’m not sure I want to realise any more of myself than I’ve already done. Maybe I’ll try it in my next incarnation.’

‘Ah! Is this a racist remark I’m hearing?’

‘Not at all; if I had any best friends I’m sure some of them would be reincarnations. Bye bye, Sanjay. Have a nice life.’

‘And you.’

We didn’t shake hands.

As of that morning I had £204.28 in my account at Lloyds and £732.74 at the Halifax. The rent for the flat, due in eight days, was £450.

I needed a quiet place where things weren’t happening too fast; I have often found tranquillity at the National Gallery so I went there now. There was a gentle rain coming down when I emerged from Charing Cross tube station; the streets were bright with reflections, the buses were intensely red. Trafalgar Square was crowded as always and on the National Gallery porch tourists heavy with lenses peeped through viewfinders at Nelson on his column, at the fountains jetting their white water into the grey rain, at the bronze lions, and at other tourists wet and gleaming.

I headed directly for Room 18, a tiny room containing only the black perspective box or peepshow by Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627–1678). I’d been hoping to have it to myself for a moment or two but a Japanese couple were occupying both peep-holes. As they left, a rush of schoolgirls filled the room with the smell of rain, their hot and feral fragrance, and their chatter; then they were gone like a flight of starlings and I was alone with the peepshow.

It’s about as big as a medium-large fish tank and the peep-holes, one at each end, offer two apparently three-dimensional views of the interior of a seventeenth-century Dutch house: in it are a number of red side chairs with leather seats, on one of which is a letter with the signature of the artist; there are pictures on the walls; there are windows and there are doorways to other rooms. In one of those rooms a woman lies in a curtained bed. Is she ill, is she dying? No one knows. In another room a woman sits reading while a man outside the window looks in at her. Elsewhere a solitary broom, that frequent emblem of Dutch tidiness, leans against a wall. There is of course one of those patterned marble floors one sees so often in Vermeer and de Hooch; alternate black and white concentric squares encouraging belief in the idea of order in the universe. On the floor sits a black-and-white spaniel of some kind; from the look on that dog’s face I’ve always assumed it to be male. I call him Hendryk.

One side of the box is fitted with clear glass; probably in the seventeenth century that side was covered with translucent paper and the box placed near a window or a candle for illumination; now it has its own special lamp. When you look through the glass it becomes clear that the apparent reality seen through the peep-holes is all illusion: things are not always in proper scale or relation one to the other: seats and backs of chairs go up walls, legs lie on the floor; the head of the woman in the bed is like a pancake.