Part of novel

1.

The first time we exchanged words a bird died. It had been limping up and down the same short stretch of pavement outside the Little Lamb hotpot restaurant on Shaftsbury Avenue with both its wings clearly broken. Most likely it had been hit by a car. I would’ve helped it; carried it home in a box or called a vet, if it hadn’t been for the fact that my friends had arrived and our table was ready. When I sat down to order I could still see it from the corner of my eye, through the glass door, about five feet from where I was sitting. By the time I left the restaurant it was motionless in the gutter.

            The walls of the Little Lamb are covered in mirrors and there is one small TV attached to the wall. The mirrors give the effect that there is not one but ten or twelve screens, depending on where you happen to be sitting. The mirrors also give the impression there are more customers in the restaurant than there are in reality and that the restaurant itself is much bigger than it actually is. A lot of places use this trick but the TV in the Little Lamb breaks the illusion with its reflected, backwards subtitles which, to be completely fair to the restaurant, probably aren’t that noticeable unless you happen to be able to read Chinese. I can’t read Chinese. But I have a friend who can and one time during a meal in the Little Lamb he told me he was confused about why the subtitles on the TV were back to front. I explained that it was a reflection of the actual TV positioned above our heads and he slapped his forehead like a cartoon character and told me he was stupid and also a little drunk.

On the night the bird died the TV was again positioned above my head. As my friends slid into place around me I watched the report reflected in the mirror. Any thoughts I had about the injured pigeon were soon forgotten in the face of the news with its images of sprawling residential towers shrouded in haze, intercut with seemingly endless crowds of Chinese citizens walking with white ventilation masks strapped across their mouths. These images were nothing new. I’d seen them before and had grown to expect them in pretty much every news item I ever saw about China. Anytime China was mentioned on the news it could be expected to be alongside images of crowds and towers. Only the cookery programmes showed a different side, with misty mountains and temples and old men making noodles in ways that would soon be forgotten when they died. What held my attention on that night wasn’t the news, it was the image of a bright orange circle that for a few seconds took up the whole of the TV screen, reflected on all of the walls of the restaurant. I’d never seen the sun look so circular, and I said this aloud to my group of friends. In response they each turned in various directions to see what I meant. The sun was a uniform deep orange. It was beautiful and it shone over interior of the Little Lamb.

There was one other customer in the restaurant on that night and he too looked up from his table at the many circular reflections. Me, my friends, the waiters and this man all stared in silence at the sun before the report carried on, cutting to an interview with a woman in a suit standing in front of a forklift truck gesturing to some scaffolding. My friends started talking about their workdays and the waiters went back to chatting behind the counter. The man at the other table turned to look at me and he was still looking at me when I raised my eyes again from the menu.

I had in fact seen the man several times before that night. He tended to sit at the same table, often alone, with enough meat and vegetables for one person to dip into the simmering pot of stock. I recognised him because, although he didn’t look at all Chinese, he seemed to be able to speak the language with complete, masterful fluency; something that had made my own clumsy jabbing at the menu seem infinitely cruder by comparison. The other non-Chinese customers I’d observed during the few times I’d been to the restaurant occasionally attempted to speak Mandarin but this generally resulted in the waiters asking them again what it was they wanted, to which they would coyly mutter in English and point at the menu.

I’d been tempted on several occasions to compliment the man on his Mandarin, or at the very least the convincingness of his Mandarin to someone who didn’t know the language, but whenever I’d thought about speaking to him the food had arrived and I was soon occupied with dipping strips of meat in boiling water. The eye contact made on that night was the first time that the man had showed any sign of registering my presence and I wondered then if he too recognised me from my previous trips to the Little Lamb. These thoughts, like those of the injured bird limping to and fro metres from where I sat, were soon submerged in the spicy stock as I tipped first the sliced potatoes and then the balls of beefs into the water. 

One of my friends had been on a disastrous date and she was telling us the details. She had recently visited Iceland and, coincidentally, so had the man she’d been on the date with. You’d assume that this would be a good point of conversation but her date had been violently sick the entire time and hadn’t enjoyed it one bit. She’d told him about the natural beauty of the Blue Lagoon and he’d told her about the unsettled bowel movements he’d had from eating a bad piece of fish. Apart from this he refused to say much else for the entire date, which, we all agreed, was unfortunate. The news had finished and the TV was now showing a Chinese historical drama with a group of men dressed in elaborate period costumes. I watched the drama as my friend continued to talk about her date’s fluctuations between awkward silence and ardent confessions of diarrhoea. The men on the TV were in a forest, squatted down in the bushes. Whatever they were talking about seemed to be important and there was a lot of nodding. I noticed that the man on the other table was also watching the TV, his mouth open and his chopsticks frozen in place, inches from his face. There was a mushroom between his chopsticks that slipped from place and landed on the table with a small splat. When this happened the man awoke from his reverie and moved the fallen piece of food to the side of his table. With the mushroom cast aside he looked in the mirror to see if anyone had noticed his lapse in concentration. This was the second time we made eye contact.  

            At one point the man got up and, after speaking to the waiter, went into the back room. I started to talk about China. I told my friends that although I’d never physically been there and although I knew little to nothing about its history, I was certainly a fan of the food. It’s a big place, someone told me. They have many different types of dishes. I agreed with this and waved my hand at the hot pot, explaining that hot pot is popular in Beijing but lots of Chinese food in London is Cantonese because of the connection to Hong Kong. One of my friends changed the subject and started talking about how there’s a great deal of construction work going on in China. They are always building so many buildings. Lots and lots of buildings. I responded that there are lots of buildings in London as well, waving my hand to the street. There are new skyscrapers and new apartment complexes being built all the time. What about The Shard? The Gherkin? Is it really all that different? The man who had been sat at the other table must have been listening from the back room because he emerged at this point and walked towards us.

            It is not the same, he told me. London is locked down. It is fixed. There may be new buildings but they are growing like moss on a turtle shell. In China the ground is moving. It shifts beneath your feet.
          We didn’t know what to say to this and after standing in silence for a few seconds the man went back to his table. We continued to eat and then I asked him from across the room if he was from China. He nodded. He said he had lived there as a boy. I didn’t know what to say to this either, so I smiled and finished my meal. He was still sat at the table when we collected our coats and paid the bill. I tried to make eye contact with him again when I moved towards the exit but he kept his eyes fixed on the reflected TV screen, still showing the men dressed in historical costumes. I closed the glass door and, parting ways with my friends, stepped over the corpse of the bird.

Jim Froydon’s Lines

Jim Froydon’s Lines, with uncompromising force of vision, has delivered a shot in the arm to the American sitcom; a genre that to many has become stale, predictable and ubiquitous. Froydon’s excellent show, premiering tonight on British television, takes the basic form of the sitcom genre and flips it on its head.

We are all used to seeing the interiors of flats, cafes, restaurants, offices. These are where the scenes of shows happen, the places that the characters meet to joke, argue, fall in love. Yet what Lines does, and what has already built a definite buzz across the Atlantic, is deny us entry to these scenes, to limit us to the places between those locations. We follow the characters from the moment they leave the door of one location, walking to the coffee house, catching the bus to the office, and we leave the moment they arrive at their destination. There are few words, maybe the occasional conversation with a stranger, an enquiry about the price of a return ticket. Sometimes the characters have tears in their eyes, sometimes they can’t stop themselves from laughing.

Was that her voice? I heard it coming from the room.

What? I can’t hear a thing.

I thought I heard her. Something she said, I could swear it was her.

Your hands are sweating. It’s making me nervous.

You can tell they’re sweating?

They’re sweating. I can see the sweat from here.

You should be nervous as well.

I’m trying not to be.

I’d be nervous if I were you.  

There’s every reason to believe it’s a baby.

Wait. Is she groaning now? Are they covering her mouth?

We have to believe it. The equipment isn’t infallible.

And tumours don’t kick.

And tumours don’t kick.

Much of the episodes take place on public transport. The camera pays equal attention to the parts of the characters’ bodies as it does to seat-cushions and handrails. The heavy eyelids of a character come into the frame for a few moments before cutting to the pale blue tessellated pattern on the floor of the train. What might sound like a tedious experience is surprisingly easy to watch and, with complete honesty, I found the gentle rocking of the carriage in these drawn-out sequences to be incredibly soothing. I’ll admit that as the character drifted into a short sleep so did I, and when my head jolted back to consciousness it was just in time to see the same action performed by the character on the screen.

Tell me the details.

They pulled it out…the shape of an egg. She was so tired afterwards. It stank, apparently.

She almost passed out but the stink of it kept her awake. There was a glistening film. Glistening was the word they used. It was coated in a wet film that dripped over the midwife’s hands. She gagged and had to pass our baby to the doctor. And his face gave it all away. The look he gave to that thing in his hands must’ve been much the same as the one he later offered me when I sat with him in his office. I’d say horror, confusion, futility. In the end all he could do was shrug. It has a heartbeat, he said. It has a heartbeat but it doesn’t have a heart.   

The nervousness about the trip is often palpable, as if the characters are on the way to an imminent breakup or a family death at the hospital. In the first two episodes given to reviewers I followed several different characters that reappeared throughout. There was a twenty-something lady with bleached blonde hair, a bald middle-aged father, a pregnant woman, a handsome man with a neatly trimmed beard. These people, although never given names, quickly become familiar to you. When the pregnant woman stared out of bus window I wanted to know the reason for her bottom lip to quiver. When she sighed and her breath momentarily clouded the cold glass I wanted to know the reason for her to sigh so deeply.

It’s about a foot, a foot and a half. It’s egg-shaped. It has a round base and it tapers up towards the top. It’s smooth. It was smooth. Yesterday it was smoother. Now there’s a kind of roughness around the base. If I touch it… it’s hard. Metal. A hard plastic. When we first brought it home it seemed a lot softer. It’s gotten harder. It must’ve gotten harder. There are ridges now, around the base. If I touch the ridges they…

How does she…

What?

You know…

No. I don’t know.

Breastfeed. How does she breastfeed?

Jesus. Why do you have to ask that?

It’s an honest question. Does she do it the same way you normally would? Does she do it at all?

I don’t know. Ask her.

People want to know.

People? What people?

Does she put her nipple in the opening? People say there’s an opening.

What people?

Puckered. A puckered hole. It’s reported that there’s a puckered hole. Can you confirm or deny the presence of a hole?

I think there’s a hole.

Is it puckered?

I don’t know what you mean.

Something like this.

Oh, right. It’s a little like that.

Interesting.

Are you writing this down?

Froydon’s genius comes from preventing the audience from having any clear insight into the characters. It seems like it would be all too easy to continue following the character once they pass through the front-door of their home. There were times while watching the first episode that I shouted violently at the screen. I screamed at the moment a bleached-hair young lady turned the key into what can only be assumed to be her flat, just as I thought a glimpse of her actual life might slip from its hiding place behind the door. My body shivered close to the edge of the seat, I looked for clues to her life, and suddenly the camera cut to the swollen paunch of a man waiting patiently in the snow for his bus to arrive. I threw a pillow at the screen. If I had a stone I would’ve thrown that too. I turned my computer off for a few moments, stood outside in the garden. I looked at sun, at one thousand colours of blue sky. I would have stayed there but, as if the programme had wrapped an invisible cable around my neck, I eventually drifted back inside to continue to the end.  

I have to plug her in every day.

Plug it in. Will you listen to yourself?

It’s what the doctor said I should call it.

And what if you don’t plug it in? What then?

She wilts. And don’t even think about convincing me to stop breastfeeding, because I can’t stand to see her wilt. I won’t do that, don’t ask me to do that. 

I’m worried about you. What if it makes you sick, what if it hurts you somehow?

She won’t hurt me.

You don’t know that. For all you know it could bite. Maybe there’s a needle. It could stick you with a needle and fill you with…I don’t know…with poison or something.

You’re being grotesque.

I’m just saying there’s a lot we don’t understand here, you have to remember that.

You don’t understand. She came from our bodies. There isn’t anything that would hurt us, there aren’t secrets. She needs to be plugged in and then she rests.

You can feed it from a bottle, what’s wrong with that?

We tried, remember? She spat it up.

Well what did the doctor say about the keys? I’ve tried to type on them, I’ve tried again and again, but nothing happens. I’ve typed out whole paragraphs but nothing comes up on the screen.

Do you know many babies that can speak after two weeks? She has to learn. She’ll learn from us. 

Janet Malory from The New Yorker, who in her already famous interview with Jim Froydon ended her questioning with a swift left-hook to the show-runner’s jaw, has said that Lines offers an antidote. An antidote to modern life? To a sickness? What exactly it offers an antidote to has been picked apart and argued by nearly every American with access to a keyboard and, if you haven’t already done so, after tonight’s premiere you’ll be able to join that debate. What is clear is that there is a cure somewhere in this programme. After getting through the second episode, after coming to terms with the fact that I was never going to see the interior lives of these characters, I felt a definite weight lift from my shoulders. I felt as if I was floating up to the ceiling.      

The operating system isn’t one I know. I tried to enter the console commands that I found online for all the versions of Windows. I called Apple. I booked a slot in the genius-bar. They were useless. No help at all. I asked a friend who knew Linux but he didn’t know where to start. Whatever the case, there’s definitely an input now, there are keys and ports and...

Are you worried about whether you wife cheated on you?

What? No.

Maybe she got bored one of the weekends you were away and well…

What?

Well it doesn’t exactly look like you, does it?

Don’t say that. I’m in no mind-set to hear that.

Sorry.

There’ve been some developments. She’s grown. She’s the size of a table and she’s lost a lot of weight, she’s flatter than she’s ever been. Her keys work now. I’ve registered my details. God knows how I managed it but I’ve registered them on her screen. The doctor said we should call it a screen. Still seems strange.

Wait. It wanted your details?

There isn’t a normal keyboard, I wasn’t sure what I was doing...

Is it fine just to put your details in like that? Did you put your wife’s details in as well?

Of course I did. That was the first thing I did. What child doesn’t know the name of its mother?

And bank details?

It’s not a scam. The bank details were just one of the sections. I put in my shoe size, eye colour, favourite film. There were pages of things I put in. Every time I wrote one thing it asked me to write another.

For a specific example of Froydon’s technique, I want to talk about a moment in the first episode which has lingered in my thoughts. Somewhere near the middle of the hour run-time there is a short sequence where a woman rides in an ambulance. I took her to be roughly in her thirties. We do not see much of her. There are glimpses of her arms, her hands. Her body is covered with a blanket.  Mostly we focus on her face. There are no windows in the ambulance. There are no sights outside to look at. There is a man sat beside the woman, a paramedic. The woman seems to be a patient, a victim, for some reason needing to be rushed to casualty. She is pale, sweating. The make-up around her eyes has slightly run. On the other side of the woman, his hand resting on her shoulder, is another man. Perhaps this man is her husband, or lover. Perhaps he is her brother. We never see more than his hand but the tightness of the grip is noticeable. The noise of the siren is loud. The woman shakes, her eyes focus on something in the distance. It is a moment of high drama or, perhaps more specifically, it is a moment teetering at the threshold of high drama, but after about a minute, once they have arrived at the hospital and the doors open, once the reasons and consequences for this woman to be in the ambulance are about to be exposed, we are unceremoniously taken away.

Someone is knocking at the door.

Go back to sleep.

Someone is there. I heard it. What if they come to take her?

No-one is coming.

I wrote in her today. I wrote some horrible things in her.

You know the doctor said we shouldn’t do that anymore. Not until they’re sure where it all goes.

I tried my hardest to get through them all but my hands felt so tired. What if they come to take her away? After the things I’ve said to her. After the things I wrote.

Yet we do see the woman from the ambulance again, later in the same episode. There are no signs of an accident. She is sat alone in a back of a taxi and she reads the newspaper. There is a look of concentration on her face but not to an uncomfortable level. What story she is reading in the newspaper we cannot see. The lines of her brow furrow and the corners of her mouth tighten. There is no hint of fear. Her face is immaculate. There are no tears in her eyes. No smudged make-up. She wears an elegant blue dress, as if she is returning from a party, and yet daylight streams in through the windows. Perhaps she is going to work. There is no sign of the man who so tightly gripped her shoulder, there is no hint of whatever illness she may have suffered from. Whatever problem caused the ambulance to take her to the hospital has been resolved without our knowledge. Froydon doesn’t give us the answers. He doesn’t let us know.

I…I wrote in her for hours. I sat there and I answered all of the questions she had. I let my hands touch her ridges, her soft keys. I felt the body which we both made. And…and there’s so much love behind her screen, I know it’s there. If I could open her up and see it.

We both know it’s there.

If I could only hear her speak back I’d be sure of it. We’ve given her so much of us. Do you understand me?

I wanted to know what happened. I wanted to know what went on when the characters reached their destinations; these places they have no clear reason to reach. But their thoughts were inaccessible to me. If there was a reason for the characters to go to the office or to go to the bar, a reason to ride to the hospital or to get a taxi home, then it is given offstage, away from the camera. No matter how hard I pleaded at my screen there was no definite reason for the characters to travel from A to B. Lines forced me to accept that. It forces us to accept that. What happens before and after these moments is not for us to be certain of.

She’s crying.

No-one is crying.

She’s humming through the wall. Can’t you hear it? There’s a low hum. Listen. There. She’s crying. It’s all because of me.

What did you do?

After all the information we’ve given to her. All she wanted to know about us. We’ve been so honest. I felt so exposed…

My love, what did you do?

Her screen shines in the light. Her base is squat but the edges above are so sharp that I’m worried I’ll cut myself. Her mouth opens and closes, waiting for milk. She’s so hungry. Her heart beats through the casing and when I place my fingers on her keys I feel it surge beneath. She’s so hungry. It wears me out. She needed more of me… The sight of that mouth…I couldn’t look at it any longer. A tissue, cotton, a towel. I pushed my fingers until her mouth couldn’t close.

I was locked out. I accepted that.

And yet when I fell asleep that night, when I closed my eyes and lay in the dark the woman was there in my dreams. The taxi I’d seen before had taken her to my home and when she arrived she’d climbed the stairs, entered my room. In the dim light of the evening she’d undressed, unzipping the outfit she wore to let it slip down the skin of her shoulders.

I watched it fall past her hips, down her legs and onto the floor. She lay in my bed and she reached out for me to join her.

Sleep, my love. Stay with me. Close your eyes and try to dream.

I’m trying.

Rest your head.

I’m trying. I’m trying but someone is knocking at the door.

You’re hearing things.

Someone is knocking at the door.

It’s going to be talked about. It will make Froydon a household name. Because by the end of the programme you will feel drained, as if you have spilled part of yourself onto the screen. You will feel drained and yet you will feel lighter.

The Bodybuilders

I sat in the back where the leather seat dipped, the stick of it pulling a creak from my jeans as I jostled for higher ground.  

-           I’m being sucked into a fucking Rabbit-hole, Jim. 

But Jim didn’t turn around, he just kept staring down the white lines that came towards the car one after the other. The music was loud, too loud for a rescue mission and with the rate we were bounding down the motorway, well over the limit, I was certain we’d get the police on us in no time.

-           You’ll kill the both of us.

-           As long as I keep the lines in the middle we won’t hit a thing. 

Jim’s shoulders loomed over the top of his head-rest. With the music playing he’d slump down before bumping his head up again in rhythm. His neck was tense, the veins standing out on the surface. 

-           Was it upper body today?

-           Core, man. Core.

Yesterday was leg day, like the week before, the month before when we’d grouped around the squat cage and Teddy had showed us three sets of 575. We’d measured him later but there wasn’t any need, he’d clearly overtaken the two of us. Jim and I took some pictures of him in front of the mirrors, the oilcan we kept by the front desk soon brought out and I sprayed a good load on Teddy’s pecks, bigger than an 8-year-old’s head. When he was oiled he flexed his arms, he flexed his shoulders.

-           Watch this. Take a picture of this.

Teddy lifted up the rack. The weights thudded onto the rubber floor and he shook it as if he were a wet umbrella.  He let out a laugh, fed through clenched teeth. 

-           Ugh. Yeah.

After showers we’d had a smoke in the changing room. Teddy let his towel fall to the floor, put his foot up on the bench and lunged a good lunge. Jim looked like he was about to do the same. He moved to stand. He stretched his calves. Jim had always been competitive, but I sat where I was. I was big, I was toned, my ass could open a beer bottle but I kept my competition tucked away. When Teddy lunged liked that, hands on hips and a cigarette in his mouth, a look of pure envy would flash over Jim’s face. I caught him looking down at his calf muscles, lifting his heel so that the muscles bulged from his legs before sadly letting his heel touch the ground once more. 

-           You see me pound it? 

-           You smashed it, man. Wrecked it.

Jim had started going to the gym later than Teddy and I. He’d joined up after his girlfriend got him a discount voucher. She wanted him to lose a few pounds, a bit on the sides and a bit on the belly, but something had clearly opened inside him and he’d jumped head-first into a strict regime of boiled chicken and twenty eggs a day. He’d grown so fast that he’d gone from M to XL in two months flat. Maybe that pace was part of what made him so jealous of Teddy, who stood before him as some constantly rising benchmark. Every session he would watch the weights Teddy lifted, write the numbers in a little notebook. As I sat there in the changing room with Teddy’s right leg raised on the bench and a look of pure contentment in the way he swivelled his upper body to-and-fro, I could feel Jim’s green-eyed envy pouring out to drown us all. 

-           You should be in magazines, Ted. You should be on TV.

In truth, Teddy was long past steroids, somewhere far beyond that at the point where he’d try whatever he could get his hands on. Rumours had it that some Quaker website had told him it was whale oil that did the trick. He’d shoot up in the toilet after eating two bananas, chuck the needle and the skins straight into the bin and finish with a high-protein bar. He did this every time, he did this right before he told us about the ad he’d found in craigslist for ‘fit guys who want to get a start in the adult film industry’. He’d forwarded it to all of us. He said he’d applied as a joke but he’d accidently forwarded his response as well and there was quite a detailed cover letter. 

-           They want a piece, they want the pie. 

So we had a routine, and we’d turn up every evening and the rows of skinny little runners would turn and glance at the three of us there. We all wore vest tops. We all looked good. We grunted and groaned, gritted our teeth and threw the dumbbells to the ground. Teddy roared as he gripped the barbell and pushed it hard against gravity’s will. With a heave he admitted that he hadn’t heard from the adult-film people. He sneered and said it wasn’t important, but his voice wavered and later I watched the corners of his eyes grow wet, his face turn to a thousand folds as he lifted the bar above his head with the faintest of tears on his cheek. After we showered he didn’t lunge, he didn’t speak. He sat and looked down at the tiles of the floor. We told him it would be okay, that just because he hadn’t heard back didn’t mean he wasn’t qualified to be naked on film. 

-           They’re just intimidated. They’re just scared of the beast.

Jim came in the next evening with a box for Teddy, wrapped up with a little green bow. It was something to cheer him up, he said. Teddy snorted but took it in his hands all the same. He pulled at the little green bow and the box folded delicately open. Inside was a snake, coiled up, its little tongue lapping out at the air. Jim said he wanted to get him something tough, and a snake was as tough as it got. Teddy grinned, he liked the gift, he took it home. He’d feed it mice and the snake would swallow them whole. 

-           It slithers and hisses. You can’t take it for walks.

-           Everybody needs someone to love. 

From then on things got better and better for Teddy. He got a tattoo of a snake on his right bicep. He showed it to Jim the next day, showed him how it would twist and swell each time he flexed his arm. Sometimes Jim would go over to Teddy’s flat to feed his pet if he was out of town, sometimes they would go out drinking without me. It seemed there was new brotherhood between the two of them, Jim’s jealousy all sweated out, and although I felt a little excluded it made me happy to see them slap each other’s backs with genuine feeling.

-           Come on, man. Don’t give up. Don’t you dare give up. 

But the words of encouragement stopped when the gym announced it was looking for a new face. There was going to be a competition, a big one, one to be in all the posters across the whole chain. The three of us went for it. All three of us got into the finals, and when the judge finally shook Teddy’s oiled hand that green look of envy, the one I’d seen so many times before, glinted back across Jim’s eyes. Later he watched from behind the cameras when Teddy’s gigantic frame was lit with flash after flash, all the muscles on his body piled together with a fake skyline draped behind. In the photographer’s studio it seemed that Teddy was expanding outwards, stretching out over the tops of buildings in bursts of lightning that bulged and shook his skin across the city. Teddy said to us that when he’d found out he was going to be in advertisements he’d felt a tension released that he’d never really known was there. Something that had clung to him for as long he could remember. 

-           Stand like a man. 

-           Like this?

-           Yeah. Yeah, just like that. Don’t move an inch.

And so Teddy’s body was the size of a building, 50 feet tall, hung from the roof. But the day they stuck up the advert was the last day we saw him. A whole week passed and he didn’t turn up to one workout. He didn’t come for core, upper-body, not even legs. I found it hard to concentrate without the sight of him there. I did the weights, I went through the motions, but it didn’t feel the same. I couldn’t focus. After one workout I’d had some drinks with Jim, a few more drinks after that. We talked about protein, we talked about TV, we talked about our friend and where he could have possibly gone. By 3am, after we’d tried his phone for the fifteenth time, I got it into my mind that we should go to his flat, that we should go there as soon as we could. So Jim drove and I sat in the back, slipping down a hole in the seat.   

-           His phone’s ringing. I can hear it ringing.

A white light shone beneath the crack of Teddy’s door. We’d knocked and rung, but there wasn’t any response. With a few steps back and few steps forward I made short work of the lock, splintered the door in half, pushed it in and Jim followed close behind. Jim stuck to my back as we rounded the corner to the kitchen. 

-           Teddy? Teddy, are you there?

There on the living room table was a pile of men’s health magazines and an open glass case. There were boxes of protein supplements, rows of jars with a light brown liquid inside. The walls were covered with porn, with pictures of famous athletes cut from magazines. The naked men showed their bodies, mouths open in ecstasy. The athletes posed on plinths, gold medals around their necks. Their smiles spread from ear to ear and with outstretched hands they beckoned us in. 

-           Come stand beside us. Come rise towards the marble men. 

There was a bang, a thud against the wall. We stood and followed the source of it, out of the living room, along the corridor. There in the hall was a door we hadn’t noticed before. A white door. Jim’s hand pointed to the handle. His finger shook and he looked me in the eye. Before I had a chance to open the door he spoke to me in a soft voice, a voice I’d never heard on him before. He asked me if I thought he was strong and I looked at him there, his neck so tense, his body so broad. 

-           You look strong, Jim. As strong as stone.

And I pulled the door. And my hand reached out for the wall. If I did not hold it then I knew that I would fall straight to the floor. Behind the door was a small broom cupboard. There were brooms, two brooms, but only their tops could be seen behind the heaving mass that pressed against the walls. 

The scaled body had been so stretched that there was neither sight of head or tail. The belly spread out over the floor, bloated and full, and that which lay nestled inside the snake was unmoving. I closed my eyes. I closed them tight, but I could still see the muscles rippling back and forth beneath the skin.   

The Buildings

The steel beam lowered in for the worker to grip, his hands the first around the hard edges pulled close to his chest. The twelve of them at his side with their gloves along the length, all the faces turned to scowls at the unwieldy broadness dropping inch by inch until it met its place down by their feet, teetered against the empty space below.

            They fed the beam straight into the frame until it lay by the one lowered in the hour before, to the one where the worker now knelt, the flame of his torch flickering an unsteady light against a pair of shallow cheeks. They untied the chains and waved up for the crane. One step to either side and they feared the harnesses wouldn’t do much for them, not with the welding tools strapped across their chests. One wrong step and they would fall down past the forty eight floors to an ugly end.

Walking along the river with the sun going down, so nice on the warm summer evenings with the towers spread out like that, like arms going out and around the city, so comforting, so close. The phone in his hand,

‘I’ll be back before it gets too late,’

sent and up and out and she’ll read it on the sofa probably, feet up, or in the foot-spa with the water quivered, vibrating like it does.

The interview set to start in under an hour. The first time the artist had wanted to talk in a decade and it was all up in the public consciousness, the painted buildings, the knighthood, and as he lingered along the river he watched the new towers half-built and the blue boards around the edges with the pictures; computer made impressions, young couples sat on the benches not yet made. They didn’t seem to fit, their clothes too colourful and he looked up over the board, glanced at the building going up and the men still working. A shower of sparks up near the top; couldn’t be safe, but beautiful in the way it seemed like a river of fire, something he’d only seen in films.

He looked at the skeleton of the building, the levels rising one after the other and a thought came about all the ceilings stacked up. If the ceilings came first, came from the ground, and the walls were put in after to contain them, anchor them down. Without the walls the floors would continue to rise, out and away, into the sky with the redness spread out and the clouds turned to sheets. What would be left then? All the people with their hands in the air, the escalators left stranded, lift shafts stubbed out. He looked at the building with the river of fire coming from the top and he snorted a little, but only against the roof of his mouth, lips closed.

Hardly an art critic, more current affairs, hardly an art critic but they’d sent him anyway. His new editor, younger than himself, had said it would be a feature, enough pages for photographs. The artist had chosen the time, the place. There was an hour to kill so he’d walked along the river to his flat, the complex nearby to where he was then with the river below and a bridge running over, the sun going down so that it fell to the towers on the opposite shore. No message from Ann yet, with her feet set to soak and the TV on. Her feet still so small and so beautiful and that time last winter when they’d lain in bed with the snow falling, the window wide and the snow seen falling, so close under sheets and her foot in his hand, the skin above the heel, his fingers pressed softly and the moan that came from her, so slight and so thin, slipped out with silk around his neck. 

A dizziness bloomed there and he worried about the dreams that had been going on for the past nights, the past week. It was hard to say for sure. He’d had them as a child and when they came then it was always at the onset of a fever. There was no fever now but it was hard to sleep.

 “I’m just waiting near the building.”

“Is it cold?” she asked with her voice soft on the line.

“It’s not too cold, still quite warm. Warm enough.”

“I was watching TV,” she told him.

“Anything good?” he asked.

“Nothing you’d miss.”

There were noises there, behind the familiar tones which came out from the cold screen against his ear. He asked her if she had eaten and she told him she had. He thought he heard a laugh but he might’ve been wrong. There was the TV in the background and the sounds of the building site coming into his other ear, the men high above working and the noise of their tools cracking into the newly built walls. It sounded like dogs, the hammers on the stone, barking dogs but hard to be sure.

“I’ll come back as soon as I’m finished,” he reassured her.

“That’s sweet but there’s no need to rush.”

“I know, but I’ll be back soon.”

“I might be asleep when you get back.”

“It won’t be late.”

The sound of the TV buzzed a man’s voice, too faint to clearly hear. “I’m feeling a bit tired, I may be asleep.”

“It won’t be late.”

He leant his weight against a railing and felt for the packet of cigarettes in his pocket. A delicate headache with the smoke gone up. She knew he loved her, she wouldn’t forget.

The dreams were not really there when he slept, more in that hour when the light outside had sunk away, before the lights of the room were switched on, when the things in his bedroom were hard to see, when they could disappear at any moment. The TV, the window, the doorway, all of them at any second flickering out of view. Then it happened that he didn’t understand the sizes of things, as if his whole vision was smaller than the thing he was looking at. It gave him a headache as he thought of it then and he looked at the laces on his shoes, neat and tied, until his headache went away.    

That morning he’d looked at the artist’s paintings, a coffee-table sized book he’d got from his editor. Pages of pictures of tall buildings, one after the other, each time he turned over they rose up, seemed like photographs but the artist had painted them all. Impressive, this city which he’d lived, metaphorically lived, for the past decade, one he’d invented completely from the ground up. There were streets, alleys, highways, all lined with the buildings so detailed and the shapes of trees arranged in rows along the pavements, perfectly spaced. There was a constant haze, the sun a faint smudge hung behind curtains of smog, but always there, on every page. The Idiot Sun, the book was called. He guessed that was why, and he moved for an hour along those streets, the heat of the morning coming over him as he stared into the windows and brushed against the doorways. He turned from one street into another, across the pages from end to end, but not one person did he meet on his way.

It was different before. The early paintings were all portraits. The artist would have friends sit for him, contemporaries. These were what had given him the first big prizes. He’d been so disarming in his studies, so sincere. They were beautiful in the way the eyes would be, like looking at the real thing. He’d liked those when he was young, Ann as well. When they were younger he’d bought her a print by the artist, one of a woman gazing straight out to the viewer with this look on her face, looking like she was staring into the sea, at least that’s what he’d made of it. She’d hung it in their bedroom, so much had she liked it, and after they’d made love and after he’d finished he’d lain and looked at this woman’s face with her eyes so dark and her skin so clear. But the artist’s style had changed. The people of his portraits had become buildings, now that was all they were, pages of buildings, rows of streets. That’s all there was.

The woman behind the desk had her eyes pinned on him the moment he walked through the door.

            “If you go to the top floor, you’ll find him there.”

So he smiled politely and moved to look towards the room behind. He could feel the woman’s gaze on the back of his head as he walked into what he guessed was the corridor to the lift, the walls lined with pale frames containing blank spaces, completely white, and he took a second to see what was there. They’d caught his eye, with five minutes still on his watch, five minutes to kill he didn’t have to rush.

As he moved closer to one of the pale frames he could vaguely see what was there in that space. It seemed nothing but white, a white rectangle in a pale white frame, but as he walked forward he could make out the details of what seemed to be a mountain; a light grey peak coated with snow that stretched far up towards the top of the painting. A curious effect, a few feet for it to go from nothing to this. Invisible at a distance, the lines of the painting were very faint and the image could only be seen when examined closely. At the bottom lay what seemed to be a wooden cabin surrounded by the outlines of trees. He looked towards the cabin, through the small window set into the wall.

It was impressive, the detail, unseen before, and moving to the next painting he again peered at the white expanse. This time the sight that came to his eyes was of an interior, seemingly a room of someone’s house, three figures he thought. The walls of the room were ornate, with curving pillars, a high ceiling. There was a window in the centre of the room although he wasn’t able to make out what could be seen through it. Of the figures one seemed to be sleeping, or at least lying down on some form of sofa, while the other two seemed to be engaged in a sexual act. His eyes widened as he took in the scene. One of the figures was lying atop the other, the thinness of its waist leading up to the curves of its chest. The figure’s head was turned away from him, but he could see the figure beneath grasp the buttocks of the one above, the fingers pressed into the skin and the slight shade that lay beneath. The other figure was lying peacefully; separate from the others, its body looking up towards the ceiling of the room. He took a few steps backward, his soles softly pattered on the marble floor, and with the steps he took the image faded into a pale blankness. The woman at the desk was looking at him still and from that distance her eyes seemed like small dark stones.

The electric light of the lift cast its dimness as he rose; a glass window in front for him to see the whole city spread out, the streetlights running out far below into orange spider legs. Ann had once come with him to the top of the Gherkin and he’d waited there for ages for her to say something. She’d stood there looking so beautiful and she never said a single word. He’d bought her flowers and she held them in her arms with the colours all against her.

            It was wrong to hate her.

The artist was sat on a brown leather sofa. His arms outstretched, his eyes half closed. Motioning for him to take a seat opposite the journalist sat with his recorder out and rested it squat on the glass table between them. It was clear to him then that the artist had been drinking. The smell came over heavily, it wasn’t like he was sat that far away, but the strength of it stung, whiskey he guessed, Islay he hoped.

“Would you like a drink?”

The bottle was poured before the journalist had uttered a peep.

They talked for about half an hour, about the book of paintings that he’d looked at that morning, about the tower-blocks the artist had painted. The artist spoke slowly; the words coming out like a piece of string tied one end to each of them, slack in the middle. The journalist told the artist about the print he’d bought all those years ago, the one he’d hung on the bedroom wall. He smiled as he remembered, about how the eyes were so real and the look on the woman’s face. How she looked out to sea, searching the waves as they rose and fell, creases unending and he’d looked at the print as he lay there in bed with Ann turned to sleep, her thigh against his, the warmth bleeding in and he looked at the woman with her face so clear, her eyes so dark, with the snow falling outside, down past the window.

Why had he stopped painting portraits?

He was offered another drink and he smiled and tilted his glass so that what little was left pooled into the side. The artist poured the bottle and the journalist watched his hands, older than his own, the fingers wrinkled into rows of lines that forked and met. So deep those groves that he felt like he was wilting into the nightmares he’d had, in the dark of his bedroom with the sizes unsure and he blinked his eyes and he stared down at his shoelaces, not missed by the artist who asked if he was okay, if he was fine. Maybe a fever was coming, his head wasn’t warm but it was hard to be sure. He told him he was a national treasure, that’s what people had said. He asked him how it felt.

“It’s a compliment, I guess.”

“Well it must be nice.”

“If people want to say these things about me then it’s their business,” the artist said calmly, his voice like thin bamboo and a cough rising in his throat until it echoed out across the space of the flat. “If they want to say nice things then I can hardly complain.” The artist smiled and drank at his glass.

“It’s good whiskey,” the journalist said.

“Finest there is.”

He himself breathed and drank, the glass hard against his bottom lip.

“Why did you stop painting portraits?”

The artist shrugged and told him that they were hard to make. He would make them if he still could.

“I couldn’t get people right.”

The artist coughed again. He craned his neck to one side, then to the other.

“Do you ever go to the coast?” he asked.

“Sometimes.”

“There was a time when I had this girlfriend. We hadn’t known each other long but she knew about my paintings, she was a friend of a friend,” the artist rubbed the area around his left eye with the knuckles from his left hand, “we went to this place on the coast. I used to go there when I was a boy. The place had changed so much.”

The artist leant further back against the sofa, his face sagging below the cone of light from the halogen bulb above them.

 “They’d put up all these new towers, all of them there. I used to have this little place to stay with a great view of the sea, but with all the building work you couldn’t catch a glimpse of it. And that was fine and all; I didn’t have much I could do about it. But I watched the people there do their building work and I felt calmer looking at those walls and ceilings than I did looking at my girlfriend. When you look at a building you’re more honest with yourself. It’s exterior from top to bottom.”

The artist rose and passed over to a pile of canvases stacked up against the wall, he took a second to sift through them before removing a small frame. The artist showed him the picture of his old girlfriend. She looked a lot like the woman in the print him and Ann used to have on their old bedroom wall. Certainly from a distance it would be easy to mistake it for the one in his memory. The painting was framed in the same way, the light was similar too, but this woman’s eyes were not so dark, were not so deep. The shape of her face was rigid in the way the harsh angles rose broadly from her chin to her cheeks, closer perhaps to scaffolding in the way it fixed resolutely to the boarders of the canvas.

“That was the last portrait I painted.”

 Staring at the picture of the woman the journalist pictured her blue eyes becoming a reflection of the sky, two glass windows pulled open to reveal a corridor lit by lights which hung from the ceiling in ornate casings.

“Do you know where she is now?”

The artist shrugged. “We didn’t know each other for long.”

Looking through the woman’s open eyes the journalist felt as if he was moving step by step along rows of doors with pale wooden frames. He tried his hand but each door was locked, each one barred. The journalist looked at the woman’s face, thought about it hung up on his bedroom wall instead of the print he’d had with Ann when they’d first lived together. He sat on the side of the bed with her sleeping by his side, her feet so soft, seen by him, caught by the gaze of the woman forever framed above, her feet so soft and the skin so close to him that he couldn’t begin to know how to grip it.

The artist asked if he wanted to get some air, he said he was looking a little green, and so finishing what was in his glass the journalist stood and followed him up and away. They walked to a set of elevator doors in one of the walls of the flat. The metal doors opened and they stepped inside. Soon they were on the roof where the air was still warm, warm enough and it seemed so open and so fresh for him there with the whole city down below them like that. Out here he could see how old the artist truly was, his hair blown by the faint wind so that it seemed light across his scalp. The wind blew soft but it came steady over the two men, the white strands of the artist’s hair seeming like smoke that clung unsteady to his scalp. By now the artist was starting to stumble, his legs weak and unsure and the journalist placed his hand under his arm for support, the bone hard and clear through the material of the jacket. The artist turned back, the waft of booze that came from his lips made the journalist wince and he almost dropped the old man as they turned to the edge of the roof.

Below was the city, the blocks that spread in clusters like limbs, the lights dotted unevenly and the roads far below like vessels of blood, the red lights of cars moving little by little, forward and out in small steel bubbles and he thought of the foot-spa, Ann’s feet sunken in the quivering water, her toes a mirage. He remembered the other man, the other man who had touched those feet; how she’d let his fingers, younger than his own, run their path from the tip to the heel. He thought of her blue eyes becoming a reflection of the sky, two glass windows pulled open to reveal a corridor lit by lights which hung from the ceiling in ornate casings. He imagined her eyes open, and he passed through their entrances. He moved step by step past the rows of doors with pale wooden frames, the carpet reaching along to the metal shutters as he waited there patiently for the lift to come. Encased in steel he rose with the floors passing one by one until he reached the top where, with tentative steps, he could peer from the edge and see the whole city spread out, the forms of towers stood there like ghosts and the sun above a faint mark in the haze.

He held her in his arms, she’d been honest and it was her after-all who had come to him. He’d held her and he’d kissed her forehead and she was so sorry and he knew, he knew.

 He travelled back down through the building, he’d looked at every archway, every corridor, he searched desperately, frantic to find her there but all was empty, no sound no echo.

“The city you’ve painted. It’s just walls and glass?”

 “No. I wouldn’t say that. Ah, there’s stairs and shafts, streets and pavements. There’re empty rooms but that doesn’t mean people don’t live in them.”

The artist had undone his fly and had pulled out his penis, before the journalist could say a word, before he could raise his hands and politely protest a stream of liquid shot out and away from the edge of the roof. The artist put his finger to his lips and made a gesture that said it was all okay, that it was something he did. The journalist watched it flow. The distance was impressive, maybe only the height, and the journalist felt sorry for the people below upset by the sudden rain. A river of fire, a shower of sparks.

“It’s more heartfelt. More sincere.”

On the way out he stopped once more at the corridor, the receptionist looking at him through the archway which hung over their heads. She had her hand ready at the button to open the doors, but he let her wait. He took his time and stared again at the white pictures which lined the walls. The mountain with its snow covered peak, it must have been made with the finest of pencils. Such delicate lines and he traced the path from the cabin into the forest. He took a step back and it vanished from view. He moved towards the picture of the room, peering at the ornate walls with their arches and curves coming out of the blank canvas, the bodies on the floor, the hands grasping the other from beneath; on its knees with the soles of two small feet open to the air, the toes tucked tightly under the thighs of the other. The slender neck of the figure arched back, its hand desperate against its chest. A hollowness in his stomach again and he felt unsteady, the fever definitely coming, the whiskey through his veins. He looked at the figure on the sofa, only half-seen in the white space, its head looking away from the others, up towards the arches that curved from the walls to the ceiling.    

            “Who made these?” he asked, calling out weakly to the receptionist further down the corridor.

            She leaned her head to see what he was talking about. Seeing him point at the pictures on the wall she shrugged her shoulders.

            “Do you want me to let you out now?”

He walked into a flower shop near the station, the colours of the blooms bright against the light green walls and the fluorescent lights hung above in strips. He looked at a pre-prepared bunch which lay in a small bucket of water, tulips.

            “I’m on my way home.”

            “I’m going to get ready for bed.”

            “I won’t be long.”

            “How was the interview?”

            His right hand was in his jacket pocket and he wrapped his fingers around the recorder with its buttons resting snuggly.

            “It was okay,” he said.

He thought about the white hair, the skin of the artist in the night air as they’d stood on the roof of the building. The wind had come over them and he was afraid that at any moment it could lift the man he’d supported by the arm and carry him away.

He could hear the TV on in the background still, someone laughing, an audience probably, probably. He could walk for a while longer, the night was still warm, there was no need to rush. His wife yawned and made a pleasant hum.

            “I’m just so sleepy, and it’s an early start for me tomorrow.”

            “Ah yes.”

            “I’ve just brushed my teeth. I’ll be asleep when you get back.”

            “I won’t be long.”

            “I’ll probably be asleep.”

            “I’ll try not to wake you.”

He paid for the tulips and held them tightly in the palm of his hand as he walked across the road to the entrance of the station. He would leave them for her in a vase of water. He would leave them for her so that when she woke and walked into the kitchen she would see them there and knew he had thought about her. 
He thought again about the floors of the building all rising up into the dark, the walls torn down and the ceilings left to float. What would be left then? The rooms all open.

The time they looked over the city together and had walked down by the river, they’d sat on a bench and hadn’t said a word to each other. She’s held the flowers, the colours all against her.

He felt his forehead, warmer now, and as he sat on the train he looked through the book, The Idiot Sun, with its pages of buildings rising out of the white haze. He walked through those streets, his feet tracing their way forward against the pavement, looking up at the rows of windows hung above his head. The towers rose higher than he could see. Their true size unsure to him, and he felt soon unable to grasp the wooden frames of the doorways, the glass planes of the windows which all looked out to him there stood alone in the road.

And he sat in the seat with the train rocking gently left and right.
And his eyes felt heavy looking at the pictures of buildings that the people had built.