depicted on one of these would be: cuddly puppies in a wicker basket, the cutest dangling from the handle. Underneath there was a slogan in curly cursive script. It read, ‘Faith isn’t faith until it’s all you’re hanging on to.’ Another showed kittens in a rumble-tumble bundle. The slogan read, ‘What we need are lots of hugs!’ Dave 2 also had A5-sized tablets of card laminated with plastic that carried the AA commandments (the Twelve Steps and the Twelve Traditions), or very important AA prayers: ‘God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change…etc…etc…’ You know the type of thing. These he would slap down on the formica, as if they were the flesh that justified his burring, bleating homilies…
The don’s voice trailed off again quite suddenly. The light in the little circular shade above his head had come on, and the nutty
wings of hair that smoothed to his scalp were burnished and refulgent in the downlight. He stood, and in the tiny roomlet of the enclosed compartment, turned and paced from one door to the other. He stopped and looked at me, slope-shouldered, ectomorphic. He was like a peardrop someone had dressed at Turnbull & Asser. His pate was framed by the gaudy surround of a retouched Highland photo, the proud stag poking its head from behind his ear.
The don looked at me and for the first time I saw something else in his eyes besides the usual facetiousness. A glimmer of hate? Or at any rate flat anger at felt or imagined hurt and insult. His clipped voice spat again:
‘You’re typing me, boy, aren’t you? You’re turning me into something that I’m not. An amusing character, an oddity, a type!’
Still facing me, he half crouched, half knelt in the space between the seats. He looked intently at my profile, as if trying to make up his mind about something, and then, apparently satisfied, he straightened up. He sat down opposite me again and recommenced his narrative in the same rapid, even tones. This more than anything else shocked me. There was something so utterly pat and performative about everything that he did. It gave me the chilling feeling that I was not the first unwitting listener to be pinioned by the don. Nor was I the first audience for this tawdry cast. There was that and there was the compartment itself. I couldn’t place my finger on it but somehow the decor was changing, as surely as if ghostly but efficient stagehands were playing their part. The scene was shifting more exactly to accommodate the don…But as if to
forestall my examining this impression more clearly, he went on.
Suffice to say that Dave 2 became a fixture in the flat, an adept of the idiosyncratic toilet-roll holder, a hunter after Marvel and condensed milk for late-night brews.
5
It
THERE ARE THOSE people in the world whose lives really are as flat as those of characters in a slight fiction. You know the kind of thing: bound in light blue cloth and picked up for 25p from a cardboard box outside a charity shop. When you get on the bus and start to read a few pages you are struck immediately by the leaden feel of the characterisations. You chuck it to one side and with it go Dan and Carol—and Dave 2 for that matter.
Gary, Barry, Gerry, Derry and Dave 1 had never supplied any depth to Dan’s life; no interconnectedness, no grout with which to edge the smooth, square featurelessness of Dan’s identity. His mother dominated him in the manner of a Roman emperor. She might send a legion to pacify him from time to time but mostly she preferred to rule him through a provincial governor, a psychological satrap she had established in his very sense of self. And Carol? Well, we know about her. Dave 2’s cards started to appear on the corkboard, next to joky parodic postcards from Camden Lock.
Carol and Dan’s life was thus
exactly
like a work of literature: thin and pulped into existence. They floated
in
vacuo,
cut off from parents, isolated from one another. Since there was no other
The don’s voice trailed off again quite suddenly. The light in the little circular shade above his head had come on, and the nutty
wings of hair that smoothed to his scalp were burnished and refulgent in the downlight. He stood, and in the tiny roomlet of the enclosed compartment, turned and paced from one door to the other. He stopped and looked at me, slope-shouldered, ectomorphic. He was like a peardrop someone had dressed at Turnbull & Asser. His pate was framed by the gaudy surround of a retouched Highland photo, the proud stag poking its head from behind his ear.
The don looked at me and for the first time I saw something else in his eyes besides the usual facetiousness. A glimmer of hate? Or at any rate flat anger at felt or imagined hurt and insult. His clipped voice spat again:
‘You’re typing me, boy, aren’t you? You’re turning me into something that I’m not. An amusing character, an oddity, a type!’
Still facing me, he half crouched, half knelt in the space between the seats. He looked intently at my profile, as if trying to make up his mind about something, and then, apparently satisfied, he straightened up. He sat down opposite me again and recommenced his narrative in the same rapid, even tones. This more than anything else shocked me. There was something so utterly pat and performative about everything that he did. It gave me the chilling feeling that I was not the first unwitting listener to be pinioned by the don. Nor was I the first audience for this tawdry cast. There was that and there was the compartment itself. I couldn’t place my finger on it but somehow the decor was changing, as surely as if ghostly but efficient stagehands were playing their part. The scene was shifting more exactly to accommodate the don…But as if to
forestall my examining this impression more clearly, he went on.
Suffice to say that Dave 2 became a fixture in the flat, an adept of the idiosyncratic toilet-roll holder, a hunter after Marvel and condensed milk for late-night brews.
5
It
THERE ARE THOSE people in the world whose lives really are as flat as those of characters in a slight fiction. You know the kind of thing: bound in light blue cloth and picked up for 25p from a cardboard box outside a charity shop. When you get on the bus and start to read a few pages you are struck immediately by the leaden feel of the characterisations. You chuck it to one side and with it go Dan and Carol—and Dave 2 for that matter.
Gary, Barry, Gerry, Derry and Dave 1 had never supplied any depth to Dan’s life; no interconnectedness, no grout with which to edge the smooth, square featurelessness of Dan’s identity. His mother dominated him in the manner of a Roman emperor. She might send a legion to pacify him from time to time but mostly she preferred to rule him through a provincial governor, a psychological satrap she had established in his very sense of self. And Carol? Well, we know about her. Dave 2’s cards started to appear on the corkboard, next to joky parodic postcards from Camden Lock.
Carol and Dan’s life was thus
exactly
like a work of literature: thin and pulped into existence. They floated
in
vacuo,
cut off from parents, isolated from one another. Since there was no other
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