Marcel Theroux - The Paperchase

‘Paint? Not particularly well. That’s not the point. It’s just a chance for a change. Things are going nowhere for me here.’

‘I thought you enjoyed your job.’

‘I don’t know what gave you that idea.’

‘Damien, is it okay if I use the phone?’ said Stevo.

‘Of course,’ I said.

Lloyd sprawled back on the sofa and let out a defeated sigh. He seemed to use his work as a narcotic. It drugged him with exhaustion. He always looked tired, like a prisoner who had been kept short of sleep and food to render him submissive. It was as though Lloyd was afraid that if it were contented and well rested, his body might make plans to escape from him.

‘Heather mentioned some kind of annuity,’ said Lloyd.

‘That’s right. It’s not much. It’s tied to the upkeep of the house.’

‘Do you know what kind of trust it’s held in?’

‘No, I don’t really. That’s one of the reasons for going over: I’ll be able to find if there’s any way I can rearrange the provisions of the will.’

‘Yeah, you ought to look into that.’

‘Do you hear anything from Laura?’ I asked.

‘Heather talks to her now and again. I gather she’s doing well.’

There was a knock on the door which turned out to be Tina from downstairs. She had lived there for over a year, but I had avoided getting to know her on the very English principle that it’s better to have cool but cordial relations with your neighbours than try to make friends and discover you actually hate each other. Since I was going away, I decided it was safe to invite her to my party, but I hadn’t really expected her to come. She was in her thirties and did something involving the Kurds which she had explained to me once when I was out trimming the hedge, but I’d forgotten.

She came in and I introduced her to Lloyd and Stevo. Her presence somehow exaggerated the atmosphere of oppressive maleness that we had managed to create between us. I gave her a drink and told her that more people would be along soon, but I didn’t fully believe it myself.

Stevo’s phone call conjured up a mob of people who spilled in at about half past ten. All of them were unknown to me; most of them were unknown to Stevo. By that time, some other guests had come, so the party didn’t seem quite so bedraggled, or quite so male as it had at the beginning.

Once I had managed to stop nursing the party as though it were a sickly baby, it managed to thrive by itself and develop an unpleasant, vaguely rowdy personality that was all its own. Stevo’s obnoxious friends commandeered the hi-fi. I went over to help out and a man with shiny silver trousers shook his head at me and said: ‘This geezer’s got crap records.’

Cravenly, I agreed with him and went into my kitchen to make a coffee.

Tina came in and I made her one too and bitched about Stevo’s friends. We both agreed that the guy in silver trousers was an arse and I began to wish I’d made an effort to get to know her before my leaving party.

‘So how are you settling in?’ I said.

‘Settling in?’

‘To your flat.’

‘Oh right.’ A smile replaced her puzzled frown. ‘I’ve been living there for two years, Damien.’

‘Wow, two years. Time flies when you’re doing night shifts. It doesn’t seem so long since Mary was down there heating up soup on her Baby Belling.’

Stevo came into the room to find more alcohol. He was drunk and his contact lenses must have been irritating his eyes because they looked big and wet like a spaniel’s. Tina and I both looked at him.

‘Her Baby Belling?’ she said.

‘It was like a fifties time warp down there. Distempered walls. No central heating. She came over from Estonia during the war. It was funny actually. She used to leave jars on the stairs outside her door for me to open. She had arthritis, so she couldn’t get the tops off. It was sauerkraut jars, Pepto Bismol or toilet bleach. Do you think that tells some kind of story about her digestive system?’

She laughed. You know you’re getting closer to an English person when you share a joke about bowels or toilets.

Buoyed up by her engaging laughter I went on: ‘Her husband was Polish. He was a barber, she told me. Get this, though: she said his business had been ruined by Beatlemania. Because no one wanted to get their hair cut!’

‘The estate agent said she went to an old people’s home,’ said Tina.

‘Oh no — she died in the flat. In fact, Stevo was with me when they broke down the door.’

‘Oh dear. I think I would rather not have known that.’

The room suddenly seemed so quiet, I thought I could hear church clocks ticking over graveyards across south London. I was trying to resurrect our conversation when Tina said: ‘Your brother is Vivian March, isn’t he? I’m a big fan of his films.’

I was smiling politely and nodding and about to move on to something else, but from behind us Stevo’s voice said, slowly and clearly: ‘Oops.’ And then. ‘I didn’t say anything.’

‘Why oops ?’ said Tina, blushing. ‘Do you not get along?’

‘We had kind of a falling-out,’ I said. ‘It was a shame because we used to be close.’

‘I didn’t know you did such a good reasonable ,’ said Stevo to me pointedly. Tina looked very uncomfortable.

Stevo had a tendency of springing surprises like this: he would call attention to some private matter when you were with someone you barely knew, forcing you either to take them into your confidence, or leave them feeling paranoid and excluded.

‘Stevo’s exaggerating,’ I said. ‘It’s really no big deal.’

Stevo loitered around the kitchen until Tina said she’d better go. She shook my hand, thanked me for the party and left.

‘Thanks for that, Stevo,’ I said. ‘We were getting on nicely until you arrived.’

‘You mean, until you told her that the flat was built on the site of an Indian burial ground.’ Stevo flashed me a smile of grey, wine-stained teeth.

People who didn’t know Stevo thought he was tricky and self-seeking. I’m not sure. I would have thought that someone really tricky and self-seeking would appear to be a self-sacrificing ingénu. Stevo certainly seemed tricky, but maybe it was a protective display like the yellow and black stripes on a stingless insect. I don’t know. In those days, I suppose I was like Patrick, who believed that everyone was tricky and self-seeking. When I got to Ionia, I found a letter in his basement in which he’d written: ‘Human beings have evolved to be assholes. Homo simpaticus is lying at the bottom of Olduvai Gorge with a flint handaxe in his rib cage.’

‘Have a toke of this,’ said Stevo, waving a conciliatory spliff in my face.

I hate pot, spliff, grass, whatever you call it. I could hardly wait to start smoking it when I was at school. Stevo and I would go buy it together in west London, and I think for a couple of years we smoked exclusively beef stock cubes and Oregano. This prevented me from finding out how much I disliked the drug itself. Also, Vivian has always been a smoker and it took me a long time to accept that someone with so much of my DNA could have a fundamentally different reaction from me to a simple stimulant. So a very common experience for me would be this: I would be having a good time at a party or concert. Someone would pass round a joint as though it were as innocuous as a box of after-dinner mints. I would take one, two, three ill-advised puffs and spend the next two hours rooted to the spot, as though I’d been struck by a curare-tipped blowgun dart. Anyway, these are the kinds of things you find out about yourself, you learn to say no, and you improve with age.

‘Nice one,’ I said, taking the joint from his fingers, and inhaling greedily.