Engleby. Part 13

I've always had what Jen might call a 'prodigious' memory, and it's not that difficult to recall her diary because the story provides a continual prompt. I know what happened next, so it's easy to be reminded. Also, she's a rather mannerly narrator, alternating splurge about her feelings with description of outside events and other people. Thus after some stuff about lack of self-esteem, bad haircut: 'In the forenoon, we did call upon Mrs Thrale...'

I suppose it would be easy to parody, but I try not to be too hard on her. Although diarists' motives are unclear, I really don't think she meant anyone else to read it.

I retrieved the book from its usual place, in the bottom drawer of my desk in study/bedroom two, actually a sort of alcove off the living room, though I suppose a double amputee might make a bed in it.

I held the diary in my hands for one last time. It was a Letts day-per-page, A4 size, broken-spined, bulging with glued-in ticket stubs and snapshots among the packed blue handwriting. The burgundy cover was mostly obscured by a collage of small pictures: from mags she had cut round the heads of Martin Luther King, Grace Kelly, James Taylor and Steve Howe of Yes; there were snipped art postcards of a Leonardo madonna and a Vermeer milkmaid; and cropped photos of Mr and Mrs A, a boxer dog and a line of three pa.s.sport snaps of Jen with Anne. There was also, bizarrely, a torn mag picture of a candlelit table with a Chianti bottle. What was that one about?

I wrapped it carefully in newspaper, then slid it into one of the padded book bags in which a scientific publisher had sent me a treatise on world food programmes that I had sold on to a book dealer in Fetter Lane. I thought of taking the parcel to the general post office on Praed Street, but something made me hesitate. I thought I'd wait till I was next out of town and post it there. I typed Mrs A's address onto a label, stuck it to the package and put the whole thing back in the desk drawer.

I get out of town a fair bit these days because I've got a new job. My report of the Brixton riot appeared under a three-way joint byline, but they pulled out a description of some of the worst fighting and ran it under my name alone. The new editor, who is obsessed by what he calls 'staff visibility', entered it (without asking me) for some tacky press awards, along with the toxic-shock story and a background piece to the trial of Peter Sutcliffe at the Old Bailey in May last year. Our crime guy, Bob Nixon, did the trial itself, but I spent six days in Yorks.h.i.+re, going over the territory. To cut a long (4,500 word) story short, I was commended in the mag features section and received a cheque for 100 at the award ceremony in a stuffy room in the Grosvenor House hotel where everyone was drunk.

This ended the career of Michele Watts. She went up to collect the prize from David Owen, a big cheese in the new SDP, but it was Michael Watson who returned, cheque in hand, to the table. Since most of the staff is now female from Jan (promoted to deputy ed), via Lyn Westmoreland, the ungrammatical fine-arts critic, to s.h.i.+reen Nazawi, the EFL-speaking chief interviewer Michele had in any case outlived her usefulness.

A couple of weeks later I got a call from a Sunday newspaper, asking if I'd go to a meeting in the Howard hotel on the Thames. Here, the editor, a man in an expensive flannel suit with large blue-rimmed gla.s.ses, bought me gin and tonic and wondered if I would like to join the staff of his paper as a feature writer for a salary of 18,000 a year, plus traditional Fleet Street (i.e. bent) expenses.

The paper is 'upper-middle market'. It does have book reviews and two pages called 'scrutiny' which purport to give the inside dope on the week's big event; but it also has a lot of stories that begin with what is known as a 'dropped intro', like this: 'When she clocked in to work on Friday at the Rusk-o-Slurry sausage works in Newark, Lincs., little could Mrs Betty Wigwam, 56, have known what a remarkable day lay in store for her...' Presumably not, unless she was psychic. The paper also carries pictures of domestic pets.

My first response was to tell him to go whistle. I liked my life as it was because I didn't have to be in an office. Since Jan had been promoted, her replacement, a pathetic Trot called Keith Dale, wasn't able to compel my presence at 'conference' and I used to ring in later to ask if he had any ideas for me.

Why would I want to swap my life of solitary fulfilment to sit around an office with a lot of hacks with only one paper a week to fill? I told him I was happy where I was, but he persuaded me to meet someone called Tony Ball, the news editor, for further drinks.

This Ball I met in an underground room in Whitefriars Street where he drank three pints of cloudy Friary Meux bitter. I had gin and tonic again. (I don't drink vermouth so much these days.) I sensed he'd been told to clinch the deal, so I thought I'd see how far I could push him. I beat him up to 22,500, four days a week (Tue to Fri) and office attendance only on Tuesday (conference) and Friday (writing).

This left me no alternative but to take the job; and so Toilet Engleby became Michael Watson, newspaperman.

Newspapers tell you what happened yesterday. Sunday papers have one big problem: nothing happens on Sat.u.r.day.

Therefore you have to invent stuff to fill them up.

I soon found out that the most valued people in the office were those who could 'come up with ideas'. Most of these came from other papers. If on Tuesday the Telegraph Telegraph, say, did a short piece on something, then on Sunday we could do a longer one. My new colleagues spent the day with their noses in other publications, looking for things they could copy or expand. Others pored over the news agency wire services, whose bare reports could sometimes be fattened up with the addition of a few 'quotes' and pa.s.sed off as one's own.

The sports people were happy because they were the exception; for them Sat.u.r.day was the big action day. They knew exactly what time everything would happen and could make up the pages in advance; all they had to do was fill in the details. It was like painting by numbers, and their only problem was how to occupy the time from Monday to Friday without developing cirrhosis. On the foreign side, our six correspondents could do a digest of what their daily colleagues had written over five days and throw in a shorter 'funny' piece they'd pinched from the local press, safe in the knowledge that none of our readers would have seen it in the Was.h.i.+ngton Post Was.h.i.+ngton Post or or Le Monde Le Monde. Their task was also straightforward.

For the rest of us, life was demandingly, agonisingly, 'creative'.

I had a desk with a phone in the newsroom, though I was seldom there. The sight of grown men, and some women, filling in expenses forms, going to the pub, reading newspapers and pretending they were working was absurd. The qualities needed to succeed at the job were patience, a flair for lateral thinking and the ability to write clearly though none of these, slightly feminine, attributes was valued at all. What was admired in the newsroom was, in this order: belligerence, the knowing use of macho jargon and the ability to drink alcohol. The atmosphere that Tony Ball tried to create was that of a Royal Marines training school. And this, amazingly, was how it had always been.

Idle for four days out of five, the reporters hung out in the fiendish little pubs off Fleet Street, where they drank ga.s.sed-up Ind Coope or halitotic dry white and circulated rumours of imminent sackings and cutbacks. They spoke with envy of anyone who left for another paper, particularly the Mail Mail, whose expenses arrangements were regarded with awe. The crime correspondent was better informed about the thinking of 'management' than on the briefings of Scotland Yard; twice a week, he drank with friends from the Mirror Mirror, keeping them warm for when the big chill would surely come our way.

They were vociferously loyal to Tony Ball when, periodically, word got round that management had finally rumbled him; yet they lived in fear. Their hands shook, not just from nicotine and alcohol, but from the 'b.o.l.l.o.c.kings' they took on Sat.u.r.days and from anxiety that the ambitious mortgages they'd taken out would become unpayable. Disaster was approaching, but for some capricious reason they didn't understand: a story wouldn't 'stand up'; it would get mangled by a casual Sat.u.r.day sub-editor with previous convictions for butchery; it would get 'spiked' on the whim of a drunken night editor. Or maybe they'd been insufficiently p.i.s.sed and collegiate at the Christmas party. Or they hadn't 'come up' with enough ideas. It was so unfair, this never-ending strain imposed by a fat four-section paper that gobbled up every half-thought they had, leaving them permanently empty-headed and hungover.

I always went home by four on Tuesday afternoon and told Ball to ring if he had something for me. He sent me out of town a bit, which I didn't mind, and once or twice asked me to interview people.

I didn't think this was my strong point.

I interviewed someone called Jeffrey Archer, who wrote books. The point of interest was... A new job, a new book, I forget. He'd been an MP, and wealthy, then lost all his money in a window-cleaning company but recouped it with adventure stories, childishly written but bought by adults. I was directed to a skysc.r.a.per on the south bank of the Thames, not far from Lambeth Bridge, and took the lift to the top.

As soon as I walked into Archer's office, he started to bark at me, like Chief Petty Officer Dunstable on the parade ground at Chatfield. I suppose he thought it would unnerve me. He pretended to be angry, then stopped suddenly and gave a hard, brief smile.

He sat me down on a sofa and pointed out some pictures by Andy Warhol (cans of soup, old film stars first-year stude decor) of which he seemed proud. By this time he was yapping like a terrier. In answer to my bland questions he told me things he must have known weren't true and other things he must have known that I I would know weren't true. He challenged me to disbelieve him. If you question any of this stuff, his drilling gaze seemed to say, then you'll really see my temper not just glimpses, but the real thing. would know weren't true. He challenged me to disbelieve him. If you question any of this stuff, his drilling gaze seemed to say, then you'll really see my temper not just glimpses, but the real thing.

Then, for no reason, he veered like a spring wind, sat down next to me, all smiles, and offered me champagne. He asked after my career, my family and where I'd been at school. He started to congratulate and flatter me.

Although he appears to be off his trolley, he's apparently very highly regarded in the Conservative Party. They keep offering him important positions.

At this point a blonde woman of a certain age (Mandy, Sandy?) came into the room (or 'penthouse' as Archer had two or three times called it) bringing the champagne and some smoked salmon sandwiches.

'Thank you, darling,' he barked at her departing back, as her black nylon calves crackled.

Then he winked at me.

I mean, really... I'd looked him up in the cuttings before I came out and seen that there was a Mrs A (some sort of chemistry gnome) and everything. But I'm ashamed to say that I smiled back conspiratorially.

I stayed and chatted to my new pal for hours, and in the end he took my home address and phone number and said he'd send me an invitation to his annual party, where, he mentioned two or three times, though I didn't understand why it was significant, we'd have cottage pie and champagne.

I must say I rather liked him.

This whole thing of meeting famous people was something I found intriguing. The news desk was always awash with invitations to launches, bashes, dos, promos, parties and functions; and since most of the reporters were too idle or too nervous to go, I sometimes taxied along to have a look. There was always free drink and it wasn't as if I had to write anything afterwards.

One of the ones I liked was the Foyle's Literary Lunch at the Dorchester. You could drink gin and tonic in the VIP room first, then as much wine as you liked with a perfectly nice lunch. This was usually smoked salmon messed up with cream cheese and stuff, then fillet steak with green beans and rather over-salted gravy but it was fine. The white wine was some sort of hock, but the red was claret from a chateau you might even have heard of. (I was beginning to notice these things by now. Was I getting posh? Don't know. I still said 'toilet' as a matter of principle; but did I now feather it with irony with the ghost of an inverted comma?) The only drawback to the lunch was that you had to listen to three or four authors stand up and talk about their new books. The thunder of false modesty was deafening.

'People often ask me how I first came up with the character of Horatio Beckwith, my famous detective. I think it was just one of those lucky coincidences. I was on a train, going to stay with my dear old friend P.J. Cowdrey in Somerset, when we stopped at a little station near Swindon. Rather an Adlestrop moment, I suppose! Anyway, a man got out of the carriage and made his way down the platform. I noticed that even though it was midsummer and hadn't rained for days, he carried a rolled umbrella with him. How very English English, I thought! And, do you know, I think it was that umbrella that gave me the key the way in, if you like, to the whole of Beckwith's character. I always carry a little notebook with me to jot down such observations, and by the time we reached Taunton I'd covered quite five pages with notes about Beckwith the school he went to, which is not, as many critics have suggested, based on Eton and no, I'm not not going to tell you which school it going to tell you which school it is is based on! his nanny, his dear mother, his regiment, his unhappy time in Ceylon. To say nothing, of course, of his dear "sidekick", Captain Trudge. As for the Captain... Well, he just sprang to life more or less fully formed, like Aphrodite from the head of Zeus! I have learned from the great stylists to always try and keep my vocabulary simple. I'm always mindful of the other demands on the reader's time. I think of myself only as a privileged guest in the reader's life, and I try never to weary him or her! and never to outstay my welcome. Never use a three-syllable word where a two-syllable one will do.' based on! his nanny, his dear mother, his regiment, his unhappy time in Ceylon. To say nothing, of course, of his dear "sidekick", Captain Trudge. As for the Captain... Well, he just sprang to life more or less fully formed, like Aphrodite from the head of Zeus! I have learned from the great stylists to always try and keep my vocabulary simple. I'm always mindful of the other demands on the reader's time. I think of myself only as a privileged guest in the reader's life, and I try never to weary him or her! and never to outstay my welcome. Never use a three-syllable word where a two-syllable one will do.'

You'd think it was James Joyce up there. I mean, Christ, how many syllables are there in the words 'it', 'butler' and 'did'?

As I was leaving one day, I b.u.mped into Sir Ralph Richardson at the cloakroom. He was retrieving a motorcycle helmet.

'h.e.l.lo,' he said. 'Do you ride a motorcycle?'

'Yes,' I lied.

'What make?'

'Er... Yamaha. And you?'

'I ride a BMW. They're marvellous. I'm just going to look at a new one. Do you want to come?'

I looked at my watch. 'All right.'

We went into the BMW showroom, a short way up Park Lane.

'Don't you have goggles or a vizor?' I said.

'No, no, I just screw my eyes up like this.'

He climbed on top of a big bike in the window. He must have been nearly eighty. He lay flat down on the tank and twisted the accelerator in his right hand. 'Brmm, brmm. Like that,' he said.

A salesman stood by nervously. I think he'd recognised Richardson. I gave him a conniving smile. These actors...

Then Sir Ralph said, 'Go on. You have a go.'

I swung my leg over and gripped the handlebars. I'd never ridden a bike before, but I copied Sir Ralph's chest-to-the-tank riding position while he stood alongside going, 'Brmm, brmm, that's the stuff.'

When he had tried a couple more bikes, we wandered through the car section back to the front door. A car salesman with a severe limp opened the door for us.

As we went on to Park Lane, Sir Ralph said, 'I think perhaps he used used to work in the motorcycle department.' to work in the motorcycle department.'

Then he called out, 'Goodbye' and walked off into Mayfair.

That's another nice thing about being a journalist. People are more or less compelled to talk to you, and this can be helpful if you don't have that many close friends. A bit odd that the last two people I had proper conversations with were Jeffrey Archer and Sir Ralph Richardson; but that's life.

Although I liked meeting these people, I didn't think I was a good interviewer. I wasn't good at summing people up. I said as much to Tony Ball (or 'b.o.l.l.o.c.k' as he's known behind his back. You can tell the calibre of an inst.i.tution by the quality of the nicknames it uses: compare, for instance, the brutal 'spaso', 'Toilet', 'Leper' with the windy 'Iguanodon' and 'Australopithecine'. The functional 'b.o.l.l.o.c.k' tells you pretty much all you need to know about Fleet Street).

However, my Archer piece had gone down well and Ball was keen for me to do some more. He gave me a list of upcoming possibilities: Billy Graham, Ken Livingstone, Douglas Hurd, Naim Attallah... I barely knew who half these people were.

I think it's time to be a bit careful. And a bit frank.

I feel that my life is finally starting to fall into place. I like being a journalist. It's insanely easy and pretty well paid. There's a sub-editor on the woman's page called Margaret Hudson. She's a bit older than I am and she's not what you'd call glamorous, but she's not at all bad-looking. She wears rather old-fas.h.i.+oned clothes: knee-length skirts, thick-looking brown stockings, pleasant beige jumpers. She's no Jennifer Arkland, I admit; but she's busty and has a sparkle in the eye. What's more, she's nice to me. She says h.e.l.lo when we pa.s.s in the corridor; she never forgets to say, 'I liked your piece on Sunday'; she comments on the weather or says, 'We never see you in the canteen' little things like that.

I ought to have lunch with her in that canteen one day, but the truth is I'd rather cut my tongue out than eat there. Imagine: queuing up with a tray, cutlery from a grey moulded bin, the gla.s.s of water, strip lights. It'd be like being back in Chatfield. The panic of the inst.i.tution... G.o.d, what are pubs and restaurants and cafes and bars for for? They exist to my mind for the purpose of not being part of an inst.i.tution. They are places you can be undiminished, unscrutinised and free. But the canteen... At the very thought my palms are wet, my armpits crawl.

Never mind. I'll find other ways of getting to know Margaret. The Features Christmas party, for instance reputedly a day-long baccha.n.a.l, ending in a cellar under Fetter Lane.

My flat is working out well and I like the area. At night I lie in bed and hear the car tyres going over the wet streets towards Queensway and Westbourne Grove. I hardly ever have to take pills any more. Just the hiss of rubber on wet tarmac is enough to rock me off to sleep, with thoughts of others on their night-time journeys.

Careful, did I say? Yes. I want to be careful not to throw all this away. This happiness. I think this is what happiness is. I haven't got it yet, but I can sense it out there. I feel I'm close to it. Some days, I'm so close I can almost smell it.

To wake up and feel enlivened; to be in a hurry to get out of bed and into the day. To have friends you want to speak to, compare experiences with and be on the phone to... Well, to be honest, I'm still some way from that that. But I do like the routine of my average day: the papers in bed while I listen to Timpson and Redhead on the radio with a pot of PG Tips; the coffee from the espres...o...b..r near Chancery Lane Tube on Tuesday and Friday; the way the unshaved Sicilian whacks out the grounds on the wooden drawer and offers me a grunt of recognition.

And then there's my Sunday walk to Marble Arch, my weekly exercise. (Steady, Toilet, don't overdo it...) My lunch in the tratt off the foot of Edgware Road over the paper, where I see who got a piece in this week and who didn't. A small gla.s.s of Prosecco before the tonno f.a.gioli, cannelloni and a litre of dense Etruscan red; then, their speciality: zabaglione, whisked in a copper pot, served with amaretti and a gla.s.s of vin santo before a snooze through the film on the big screen next door. Simple stuff, I admit, but hard to beat. Ciao, Mr Watson. Everyone calls me Watson, by the way, now; I even have an Access card in that name. I sign myself with virile candour pressing through the carbons: M.K. Watson. (Christ knows what the K stands for.) Ciao, Bernardo. See you next week. Ciao, ciao.

That's the careful bit, my advice to myself: Hang on. Don't take it for granted. Steady as you go.

Now the frank bit. Deep breath. Here it is.

One day in my first year at university I woke up in a psychiatric hospital.

This was (after Chatfield, obviously) the most unpleasant experience of my life up to that point. And this is how it happened.

It was during the vacation, and I'd got quite a well-paid job working for a plastic-seating factory in Basingstoke. My previous experience in the paper mill and some improvements to my CV meant I was in a semi-supervisory role. I had to get up early to drive the Morris 1100 down from Reading, but I liked the sense of escape, and it was only half an hour from the front door of Trafalgar Terrace. I was listening a lot at that time on the car stereo to Time and a Word Time and a Word by Yes (there was a song I liked called 'The Prophet' all gluey organ intro, then zithery strings before the arrival of the ill-matched rhythm section, where the drums feather fast but the bone-rattling ba.s.s guitar clonks away right up front of the mix) and by Yes (there was a song I liked called 'The Prophet' all gluey organ intro, then zithery strings before the arrival of the ill-matched rhythm section, where the drums feather fast but the bone-rattling ba.s.s guitar clonks away right up front of the mix) and The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys by Traffic, which ends with the longest saxophone belch in record history. I used to time it so the tape ended with its burp as I pulled up in the works car park by Traffic, which ends with the longest saxophone belch in record history. I used to time it so the tape ended with its burp as I pulled up in the works car park Bleeeeeaaaeeeeeeeerrrrggggghhhhhhhhh Bleeeeeaaaeeeeeeeerrrrggggghhhhhhhhh.

Wednesday afternoon was a half-day at the factory, and rather than go straight home I thought I'd do some shopping and look round a bit. The expanding town of Basingstoke seethed like Laoc.o.o.n within its concentric ring roads. I followed the signs for the town centre, but, after I'd spent fifteen minutes negotiating roundabouts and obediently going where the signs told me, they had brought me back to where I'd begun. The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. I didn't know that T.S. Eliot had been on the Basingstoke Urban District Council Highways (Ring Roads and Street Furniture) Committee.

I found myself angry, and this is something to which I should perhaps also confess at this point. Anger. I've found, at moments in my life, that this emotion can cut free from the thing that provoked it and become an independent force.

Just as grief, as I explained, seems to have a life of its own, away from the loss or the memory that caused it, there can come a moment in anger when, even if the source of irritation were removed, it would be too late.

This is perhaps important, so maybe I should try to explain.

Are you familiar with catastrophe theory? Think of a graph with two axes, the relations.h.i.+p between whose quant.i.ties is charted by a steady diagonal. On the vertical: Engleby's temperament; on the horizontal: the annoying thing; on the diagonal line you draw with your ruler and pencil: degree of anger. All goes steadily until a certain point: a camel-straw or catastrophe. At this moment the relations.h.i.+p between the two axes stops being constant because a new element comes into being: rage.

To represent the relations.h.i.+p between the formerly two, but now three, quant.i.ties you need to make a three-dimensional graph, because rage, while related to Engleby's temperament and annoying factors, is in fact a separate ent.i.ty.

What's frightening about this third dimension is that at some stage (and here we depart from the cla.s.sic catastrophe theory model), the rage becomes not only separate, but independent and self-sufficient. Catastrophe indeed.

As I was circling in my car, I worked out that, just as the North Pole is always north, the town centre is always at a tangent from the ring roads and that it therefore didn't matter which unsigned approach to it I took.

I was right well, obviously and ten minutes later parked the mildly overheating Morris 1100 in a new multi-storey car park and walked up the main shopping street. I was still angry, borderline enraged. What about? The factory work, the ring road, all that, yes, but other stuff as well. Stuff I couldn't put a name to even if I wanted. Deep; and unidentifiable, because I couldn't see it or name it. Fishy monsters at the mile-deep bottom of a loch, left over from some older evolution. Childhood or something; the dawn of awareness; the scramble to adapt to mould what I was and what I felt into something the world could accept.

In the shops, which were virtually the same as the ones in Reading, I drifted round. I thought of buying a present for my mother or for Julie, but I didn't have much idea what they liked in the way of clothes, or of sizes. Size ten, for instance. Is that large or small? It sounded vast, but the dress didn't look that big.

Then I saw a record shop, on Church Street, and that looked a likely place to pa.s.s some time. For Jules I bought Honky Chateau Honky Chateau by Elton John because I thought it might bridge the gap between the music I liked and the sort of c.r.a.p she listened to. by Elton John because I thought it might bridge the gap between the music I liked and the sort of c.r.a.p she listened to.

The youth behind the counter (about my age, I suppose) said why didn't I get Pictures from an Exhibition Pictures from an Exhibition.

'Because I want this,' I said, holding up the beige gatefold sleeve of Honky Chateau Honky Chateau, 'and because I'm not paid till Friday so I can't afford two records.'

'Have you heard of Pictures from an Exhibition Pictures from an Exhibition?'

'Of course. Everyone's heard of Mussorgsky.'

'Eh?'

'The composer. The man who wrote it.'

'No. I mean Emerson, Lake and Palmer,' said the youth, with a whinny of superiority. 'Have you heard of them?'

'Heard of them?' I could feel the catastrophe looming. 'I saw Keith Emerson and the Nice play the whole of Ars Longa, Vita Brevis Ars Longa, Vita Brevis at the Lyceum in'69. I got at the Lyceum in'69. I got In the Court of the Crimson King In the Court of the Crimson King by King Crimson with Greg Lake on ba.s.s and vocals from Virgin by post before it even hit the shops. I played "Twenty-First Century Schizoid Man" and "Epitaph, including 'March for No Reason' and 'Tomorrow and Tomorrow'" so often I wore out the stylus. I hitchhiked to Birmingham to see Atomic Rooster live, and, yes, they did have Carl Palmer on drums. by King Crimson with Greg Lake on ba.s.s and vocals from Virgin by post before it even hit the shops. I played "Twenty-First Century Schizoid Man" and "Epitaph, including 'March for No Reason' and 'Tomorrow and Tomorrow'" so often I wore out the stylus. I hitchhiked to Birmingham to see Atomic Rooster live, and, yes, they did have Carl Palmer on drums. Heard Heard of them? I pretty much put them together. I first heard-' of them? I pretty much put them together. I first heard-'

'Keep your hair on, mate. Do you want a bag?'

No, I want to take you out back and beat your f.u.c.king head on the floor.

'Thank you,' I said, and took the bag out onto the street.

I had some blue pills in my pocket and I took two. I knew the symptoms, but I'd never had them this bad before.

Then I went to an off-licence and bought a half bottle of vodka. I drank it pretty much straight off, using the paper bag as cover.

The town centre was all coming down or going up. Earth movers and diggers and jackhammers were replacing parts of Hamps.h.i.+re with slabs of reinforced concrete, plate gla.s.s and shop names lettered in pink and turquoise corporate swirl. Their moving, digging and drilling was ploughing up the past and furrowing my brain.

I went into a large clothes shop. It might have been Debenhams or British Home Stores or Marks & Spencer, they all look the same to me. They all sell eight million nighties nighties.

I walked slowly between the counters, and picked up many of the clothes in my hands. I felt nylon, wool, silk and cotton. I felt a lot of terylene and dacron. I let it run through my fingers because I wanted to rea.s.sure myself that it existed.

These molecules (polymers, I think) ran, slick and synthetic against the pores the ever-so-organic, mammal pores of my skin, my dermis dermis. The jackhammer in my temples, the enlarged molecules in my hand. It was like that time in Izmir when the centripetal force of Engleby had failed and I began to fly apart, into my atomic pieces.

I held on tight. Men's lambswool sweater. Woman's brushed nylon peignoir. Child's school socks (wool and polyester mix).