Anne Billson - Suckers

After an hour spent trying to stuff the corners of the duvet into my ears, I gave up and sat down at my desk, donned my rubber gloves, and cut up some magazines to compose a letter to Patricia Rice. It wasn’t a particularly inspired letter; I was too bleary-eyed to summon up much creativity at that time in the morning. But I called her a CoMmIE LEsBiAN CoW, even though I knew perfectly well she was neither commie nor lesbian, and I informed her that her every move was being watched by mR BoNes and his BoDy ROt CReW, members of a Californian killer-hippy cult which was plotting to take over the whole world, starting with Lambeth.

Gripping the fibre-tip pen in my left fist, I laboriously printed Patty’s name and address on one of the plain brown envelopes I’d bought from Woolworths. The Krankzeits’ visitors yelled goodbye and clomped laughing and weeping into the night, but Gunter and Christine continued to drop concrete blocks on their floor at regular intervals, so I took the opportunity to compose an angry letter to the council about the recent proliferation of rubbish on the street. From force of habit, I withheld my identity but listed the names and addresses of my next-door neighbours who had once held an all-night party and told me to fuck off when I’d complained about the noise, followed by the name and address of the drug dealer who owned the four Alsatians which sometimes howled all night because they were kept in a tiny backyard which was never cleaned, followed by a postscript in which I hinted that the noisy community centre down the road was allowing drugs to be sold on the premises. As an afterthought, I signed myself Gunter Krankzeit.

By this time, the noise had subsided into the to-and-fro-ing I recognised as normal bedtime routine, so I thankfully sealed the envelopes and crawled back into my bed. The last thing I remembered thinking about was Alicia, and the way she’d sniffed the air as I’d come out of the darkroom, and asked if anyone had been smoking. That had got me so mad I’d almost told her about Jack and Roxy.

I fell asleep watching the light fitting sway in time to the last dwindling thuds from upstairs.

I dreamt about a boardroom where a dozen or so people were sitting round a table. They looked like regular executive types, but I knew they were not.

‘She can’t handle it,’ said one of the men. He looked familiar. In my capacity as dream director, I zoomed in for a close-up and saw it was Burt Reynolds. ‘She could easily lose control.'

‘Give her a chance,’ said someone else. It was Robert Redford — I had evidently assembled an all-star line-up.

‘But she’ll lose her head,’ Burt said. ‘And it’ll be a disaster, like before.

‘I think you’re wrong,’ said a woman with startled eyes. Good grief, I thought, what was Liza Minnelli doing here? ‘She’s learned her lesson.'

‘I wouldn’t be too sure.’ Burt coughed, as though embarrassed by what he had to say next. ‘I don’t know whether any of you are aware of this, but she still thinks she’s in love.’

There was some snickering at this. ‘Love?’ sneered Liza, and I saw now her eyes were not just startled, but glittering cruelly in a way I’d never seen before. ‘She doesn’t know the meaning of the word. She’s interested in nothing but power, and the wielding of it.’

I wanted to chip in and tell them no, they’d got it wrong, I really did love Duncan, I’d loved him for years. Perhaps not in the accepted sense, but my feelings for him were stronger than they appeared. But the role of dream director was limited to lining up the shots. I wasn’t really there, I could do no more than watch and listen as they went on discussing my case.

‘Nevertheless,’ said Burt, ‘she maintains he is still important to her, especially after Paris. We should keep her under surveillance. She might still do something rash that would jeopardize the entire project.'

‘In that case,’ said Robert, ‘may I suggest we contact the Hatman? Andreas Grauman has reasons of his own for wanting to keep an eye on her, which in my view makes him all the more trustworthy.'

There was a ripple of approval. ‘An excellent idea,’ said Liza.

Mention of Grauman made me feel uneasy. I hoped he wasn’t going to turn up in my dream. But then the debate took a weird turn, and they all started talking about Israelis and Palestinians. There was a time and a place for politics, I thought, and it wasn’t in my dreams. I listened for a while, tried in vain to vary the camera angle or cut to another scene, but succeeded only in waking myself up.

Next day my instincts were telling me things. I needed a holiday. I always needed a holiday, but, unfortunately for me, I was the conscientious sort. There were half a dozen deadlines looming — one of them for Jack’s magazine — and I prided myself on being reliable. Unreliability would lead to no work, would lead to no money, and we couldn’t have that, not while the Have Nots were roaming the streets as a reminder of what it would be like.

But most of all, I didn’t want to leave Duncan. Especially not now, when he was paying me more attention than he’d paid me in years. So I did what I’d promised; I headed for Multiglom Tower.

It was a long haul. To get there, I had to go to Tower Hill and transfer to the Docklands Light Railway. It was years since I’d been anywhere east of Aldgate, and the city had changed. The railway was fun, like a slow-moving roller-coaster trundling through a half-finished theme park. Sticking up from the otherwise uniform acres of gutted warehouse were the developers’ party pieces: toy town halls made from primary-coloured building blocks, Lego pyramids covered in shocking pink scaffolding, and Nissen huts decorated with Egyptian murals. Viewed from the comfort of the train it was amusing, but as soon as I emerged from Molasses Wharf Station I found myself trapped in a pedestrian’s nightmare. Progress was thwarted at every turn by fenced-off building sites or gloomy basins of stagnant water. Concrete mixers blocked the pavements. The ground was coated with a layer of pale mud, and every so often a truck would thunder past and splash the backs of my legs. The only other people I saw were distant figures in yellow helmets. My A-Z of street maps was obsolete; streets that were supposed to be there no longer existed, and new ones had sprung up in different configurations. I buried the book in my bag and tried to dust off the instincts that were still sulking from having been dismissed earlier on.

Fortunately, I could see where I wanted to go. It would have been impossible to miss it. Had it been a sunny day, the shadow would have fallen across my path. Multiglom Tower loomed up out of the drizzle like a gigantic monolith, its summit swathed in wheeling seagulls and wisps of grey cloud. The building was controversial, less for its design than its height; it had buggered up half of east London’s TV reception. I had seen photos, but now I had to admit they didn’t do it justice. It reminded me of a sound system: a stack of tape-decks, amplifier, and CD player in black glass, opaque except for odd little pinpoints of red and white glinting deep within the walls. But who could tell what kind of music it would be playing? I steered towards it, or tried to.

After about half an hour of dodging traffic and sneaking through gateways marked with signs of men being struck in the chest by lightning bolts, I found myself within spitting distance of my destination. I circled it warily, craning my neck to stare upwards, feeling like a lost tourist trying to get her bearings in the middle of Manhattan. There were two entrances. There was a service door big enough to swallow a fleet of trucks, but while I was there I saw only one vehicle emerge — a navy blue Bedford van with a tinted windscreen and the words DOUBLE IMAGE stencilled (twice) on to the side.