Engleby. Part 11

It pleased me that my byline my journalistic ident.i.ty was a misprint. Mike, Toilet, Groucho, Irish Mike, Mike (!), Prufrock, Michele... I sometimes saw it as that evolutionary drawing of the crouched ape who by stages turns into an upright human. (Completely fallacious, of course, that drawing, suggesting that h.o.m.o sapiens h.o.m.o sapiens descended from an orang-utan. We are not descended from him any more than a gibbon is descended from an orang-utan. We are not descended from him any more than a gibbon is descended descended from us. All we did was share an ancestor, at some stage, before the human and ape paths diverged. For a metre or so in the hills of the Ardeche, the rainwaters of the Rhone and Garonne are one and the same trickle, as I learned on an interminable 'field trip' from Chatfield. Then you can see them split, on that pebble there, from us. All we did was share an ancestor, at some stage, before the human and ape paths diverged. For a metre or so in the hills of the Ardeche, the rainwaters of the Rhone and Garonne are one and the same trickle, as I learned on an interminable 'field trip' from Chatfield. Then you can see them split, on that pebble there, that that one so one rivulet heads to Ma.r.s.eilles and the Med, the other to Bordeaux and the Atlantic. You put your hand in and lift out some water, rearrange it: no, it's the Med, thence Africa for you drops, after all, and you lot are off to New York City. Life, incidentally, is not like a watershed.) one so one rivulet heads to Ma.r.s.eilles and the Med, the other to Bordeaux and the Atlantic. You put your hand in and lift out some water, rearrange it: no, it's the Med, thence Africa for you drops, after all, and you lot are off to New York City. Life, incidentally, is not like a watershed.) Then I settled down to do the work. They wanted articles, so I had to give them articles.

How? Initially, I bought science and medical magazines and rewrote brief news stories from them in a more contentious way. If Nature Nature reported developments in the chemistry of pollution and its consequences then it wasn't hard to deduce which multinational companies were most affected. Then I'd ring their press office to see what they thought about the article. Some were sniffy about my magazine, but some did call back with what they called a 'quote'. If the reported developments in the chemistry of pollution and its consequences then it wasn't hard to deduce which multinational companies were most affected. Then I'd ring their press office to see what they thought about the article. Some were sniffy about my magazine, but some did call back with what they called a 'quote'. If the British Medical Journal British Medical Journal said that money had run short for research into cervical cancer, it was easy to find out that the government body responsible for the grant allocation hadn't got a single woman on it, then ring some duffer and ask why not. I became familiar with that forlorn figure the 'press officer'. Soon the wire cage beneath my letter flap began to clog with press releases. Sometimes I merely rewrote them and pa.s.sed them on to the magazine. With others, I could find a fault line or a nub something that could be prised open. Then I rang the press office and kept on at them until they, or someone they had pa.s.sed me on to, said something unwise. In the right mouth even 'no comment' looked like admitting they'd killed or maimed a hundred children with their procedures. said that money had run short for research into cervical cancer, it was easy to find out that the government body responsible for the grant allocation hadn't got a single woman on it, then ring some duffer and ask why not. I became familiar with that forlorn figure the 'press officer'. Soon the wire cage beneath my letter flap began to clog with press releases. Sometimes I merely rewrote them and pa.s.sed them on to the magazine. With others, I could find a fault line or a nub something that could be prised open. Then I rang the press office and kept on at them until they, or someone they had pa.s.sed me on to, said something unwise. In the right mouth even 'no comment' looked like admitting they'd killed or maimed a hundred children with their procedures.

Then I started looking at the book-review sections of these journals and telephoned a couple of the publishers to see if their authors would like to be interviewed by a magazine they'd never heard of. They were so surprised to be asked that they sometimes said yes. I concluded that the market in scientific interviews was slack.

I bought a reconditioned typewriter from Globe Stationers on Praed Street and a Teach Yourself to Type Teach Yourself to Type manual, which involved covering all the keys with bits of paper till I could touch-type. I was able to check some facts in reference books in the Porchester library, which was in walking distance, but I had to spend a good deal on magazines and telephone calls. The cheques that stuttered in weeks later were at the union minimum rate (and this was one union that clearly hadn't flexed its muscles), but my work as Glynn Powers's lieutenant made up the shortfall. Plus, since I had been at it for a decade now, I had developed the knack of helping myself if I liked the look of something. I read in the paper some lawyer offering mitigation for a klepto shoplifter on his fiftieth charge: 'My client, your honour, is unable to postpone the pleasure of acquisition.' Mine was more of a need than a pleasure, but I knew what he meant. I joined the National Union of Journalists, freelance branch, and they told me I could offset my subscription against tax. I didn't pay tax. manual, which involved covering all the keys with bits of paper till I could touch-type. I was able to check some facts in reference books in the Porchester library, which was in walking distance, but I had to spend a good deal on magazines and telephone calls. The cheques that stuttered in weeks later were at the union minimum rate (and this was one union that clearly hadn't flexed its muscles), but my work as Glynn Powers's lieutenant made up the shortfall. Plus, since I had been at it for a decade now, I had developed the knack of helping myself if I liked the look of something. I read in the paper some lawyer offering mitigation for a klepto shoplifter on his fiftieth charge: 'My client, your honour, is unable to postpone the pleasure of acquisition.' Mine was more of a need than a pleasure, but I knew what he meant. I joined the National Union of Journalists, freelance branch, and they told me I could offset my subscription against tax. I didn't pay tax.

I kept the Morris 1100, and the Westminster parking wardens weren't officious, though eventually I did invest in a resident's permit. I bought a second-hand television from the Portobello Road, but there was hardly anything I wanted to watch on it, so in the evenings I tended to do what I'd always done: drink.

In London the distances are much greater, so I couldn't any longer stagger from the Kestrel to the Bradford to the Waterfall, from Bene't Street to Free School Lane. I could still drink, but now I was obliged to drink and drive. I started with some obvious Young's pubs in Hampstead and Chiswick and Mortlake and Battersea, and the Spread Eagle in Parkway. All Young's pubs are similar. You get a certain dependable effect from from four pints of Special: in the adenoids and the back of the cranium. Thunk. Then I winkled out dirtier places in Camden Town and Islington with wooden floors and men with odd tattoos. It was only a few months before I was in the Isle of Dogs in pubs sleepy, small and underlit, so you felt as though you'd crashed into someone's living room and East Ham with its menacing camaraderie. The only area I avoided was the West End because all the pubs there were tourist-tormented and fake; also, even for an efficient smoker like me, it was like being in the beagle section of a Philip Morris research lab. Other districts? I wasn't an inverted sn.o.b. Chelsea had some pleasant bars in small streets going down to the river: men in polo neck sweaters with pet dogs and free bits of cheese and salt biscuits set out on the bar. Mayfair pubs are better than you'd think, and in Belgravia there are one or two homely yet louche with tall, silent women that I'd happily go back to.

Sometimes I went to the Hammersmith Odeon. I saw Ted Nugent there (Sunday 12 September, 1976; sorry, but I kept the ticket stub) and my ears rang for a week. I stood next to a tall girl in pink dungarees with long black curly hair; she was so beautiful I had to move away. Joan Armatrading. Thin Lizzy. Graham Parker & the Rumour. Or Dingwall's, Camden Lock, though there was something smug about that place. And the Stranglers. They seemed to be on everywhere, the Rock Garden, the Odeon. I could never get Stellings to go to these places ('Punk, Groucho? Got the wrong l.a.b.i.al at the front of the word if you ask me'), so I went alone.

Overnight, everyone's stopped wearing flares after all these years and is suddenly back into drainpipes: jeans, needlecords, doesn't matter so long as they're straight. If you wear flares it's like saying you're into Barclay James Harvest or the Moody Blues.

There was a girl I noticed at a Graham Parker gig. She, too, stood alone, gla.s.s in hand. She didn't jump up and down, she didn't even tap her foot she swung it, back and forth, so it grazed the ground, in time with the music, just. She had dark hair, cut to the shoulder, was about twenty-seven, with large brown eyes and an expression of resigned amus.e.m.e.nt. I tried to guess what she was on: detached but not s.p.a.ced out, controlled but relaxed. Her clothes looked different from the other women's. She wore black woollen trousers and a quite long black jacket over a low cut white tee shirt with rows of silver necklaces.

I got another drink and moved into a position where I could watch her more carefully.

The gig ended with Parker singing 'Hold Back the Night'. This thin, rodent-like man with sleeveless tee shirt and bare arms his snarling manner still seemed defiant even when admitting to emotion: 'Hold back the night,/Turn on the light/Don't wanna dream about you, baby,' he sang, but almost spat. According to New Musical Express New Musical Express, he used to be a petrol-pump attendant in Camberley, which is not that far from Reading. If only I'd had the 1100 in those days, GP could have filled her up.

The woman I was watching made her way slowly out of the building and walked towards Fulham Palace Road. I had nothing else to do, so I followed, at a distance. What talent the Secret Intelligence Service had pa.s.sed up, I thought, as I hung back momentarily in the doorway of the Kentucky Fried Chicken shop.

She turned down Lillie Road, then eventually went round the back of Nye Bevan House on the Clement Attlee Estate. I wonder what it's like to be remembered as a block with broken windows and urine lifts. Hugh Dalton the Man, I read once, was a pompous a.r.s.e who went to Eton and Cambridge then got up the noses of his fellow leftist MPs; but Hugh Dalton the House... No games fields run down to the Thames at Windsor; no sound of college bells sends brainy boys hurrying to cla.s.s. (Do you think clever boys like being all together, or does it sap their belief in their individual ability? Tell you one thing: I bet they have better jokes. I bet they aren't called 'spaso' this and 'Toilet' that.) But I wouldn't want to be remembered as a council block. 'The lift in Engleby's out of order again'; 'The council have refused to grant more money to clean up the graffiti on Engleby House.' No, no. 'The Engleby Choral Scholarship', that's more my line; 'The Engleby Foundation Award for International Peace' though 'peace' marches and 'peace' committees have for so long been fronts for old Communists that perhaps I'll give that word a miss for another couple of decades.

In Tournay Road, my woman went into a house and banged the door behind her. I noted the number and lit a cigarette as I watched from across the street. Sure enough, a light went on in a first-floor window and I saw her come and spread her arms wide to pull the curtains. It was a fine gesture, maternal and inclusive.

Reluctantly, I began to make my way back to where I'd left the car. On Fulham Palace Road there was a small f.a.gs-and-paper shop still open. I went in to buy some B&H, and, while I was there, looked through the top-shelf magazines. Some specialise in short, dark-haired girls, some tend to have taller, leggier ones with fairer hair. (They don't advertise this, but you get to know them.) There's been a development in all of them lately, and it's not a subtle one. There used to be veiling, draping, covering even baldness. Not any more. Now there is disclosure. The girls look a little surprised and some of it pores, pimples, follicles has been fogged, you can see, airbrushed and tidied up. But what on earth do they think they're doing, those girls, smiling as they display their clefts and folds? I suppose they're all toms and are paid a hundred pounds for it. Perhaps it's safer than getting in a car behind King's Cross. I feel for them, when I see their defiant smiles clinging to the centre of the lens, though it's not their eyes you stare back at. One or two look nice and I'd like to meet them; I'd like to push their knees together, throw them a rug, sit down and talk to them.

You can't browse for too long; you can't stand there, thumbing through a wide selection; there's an art in not embarra.s.sing Mrs Patel at the till. Confidence is the key. There's no point in pretending that at midnight the magazines are incidental an afterthought and that your main reason for venturing into the shop was to buy this morning's Daily Express Daily Express.

I placed two magazines frankly on the counter, then asked for cigarettes. I paid with a ten-pound note and Mrs P dropped the change from a safe height into my open palm.

She looked pale and sad, with her red shawl wrapped round her head and shoulders. She must have hated this country and her job, selling pictures of English girls with their legs apart. There were little patches of brown pigment round her tired brown eyes.

She also looked cold. In her mind, I suppose, she was hearing the warm winds of Uttar Pradesh.

Why are there so many Indians and Pakistanis in London? It doesn't seem to suit them at all. On Star Street, round the corner from my room, there's a grocer whose family got kicked out of Uganda by that tubby cannibal Amin. He's educated, this grocer man, went to university, but now has to sell raw ginger, woolly apples, chillies, UHT milk and canned lager for night workers who pay over the odds. He had no choice, I suppose, but to come here; and he's going to push his children hard in school. He goes to bed at one a.m. and gets up again at four to go to the markets; there aren't enough hours in the day for him. His family will be shopkeepers for one generation only, that's his vow. He also knows a h.e.l.l of a lot about football and remembers every detail of England going out to Poland in the World Cup qualifier ('then Kevin Hector came on as sub') though he can't have been here long at the time. I'm pretty friendly with him; we've had a few chats.

I understand why these people came to England because they had to. Also, it was good for us to have new blood, different customs, new music, revitalising cultures. (I'm trying to make it all not boil down to curry restaurants, though that's clearly been a potent aspect of it.) A certain number would have been fine. But all those hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis who came just because they could because their mother's cousin knew someone in Camberwell who had a spare room where they could sleep six more. Did you hear that, Saeed? There's a vacancy. So, forget the Khyber Pa.s.s; goodbye, Peshawar, farewell Karachi come to Peckham.

I feel guilty about how disappointed they must be. There's nowhere near enough one-room shops in Tulse Hill for all these people to own. There's only so many raw chillies, Quavers and cans of Strongbow cider that Lewisham can stomach. Even for top-shelf mags and John Player Specials the appet.i.te sometimes sleeps. You need a break. I think in Leicester and Nottingham these people work in factories; they've become the manufacturing labour force. But not in London, because there are hardly any factories here. And they don't do much on the buses or the Tubes or in the hospitals, either, because those jobs are mostly taken by West Indians.

And how miserable are those those guys? What are they doing here? They look completely out of place. They'd been coming in small numbers since the War, but they say it was a Midlander with a thin moustache, a man called Powell, who urged them to come en ma.s.se and clean the hospitals when he was Minister for Health. But it was so cold when they got off the ships. It wasn't a change of town, it was a different world. Imagine arriving in Halesowen or Sutton Coldfield, shivering, looking like that like someone whose forbears for millions of years had lived in the tropics then having to cover your sensitive shivering skin with woollen hats and gloves. And sallow natives staring at you with their pink eyes. The only jobs on offer are shovelling human waste in dirty hospitals or driving trains in underground tunnels so tight they're like barrels round a bullet. So, from islands with big skies and the effects of sun you're imprisoned under windless locked grey cloud. guys? What are they doing here? They look completely out of place. They'd been coming in small numbers since the War, but they say it was a Midlander with a thin moustache, a man called Powell, who urged them to come en ma.s.se and clean the hospitals when he was Minister for Health. But it was so cold when they got off the ships. It wasn't a change of town, it was a different world. Imagine arriving in Halesowen or Sutton Coldfield, shivering, looking like that like someone whose forbears for millions of years had lived in the tropics then having to cover your sensitive shivering skin with woollen hats and gloves. And sallow natives staring at you with their pink eyes. The only jobs on offer are shovelling human waste in dirty hospitals or driving trains in underground tunnels so tight they're like barrels round a bullet. So, from islands with big skies and the effects of sun you're imprisoned under windless locked grey cloud.

They don't like it, those people, they don't like it here and their children don't like it either. The kids don't play the game, though. They don't work or drive buses; they take drugs, play music and think of bright islands they've been ripped up from, but never seen. They're angry. Who can blame them?

The ferret on my magazine, Wyn Douglas, had a party in the Windsor Castle on Mayall Road in Brixton. He lives there. It's black council tenants and squatting white marginals: Trots, rad fems, primal screamers. The council's trying to pull the area down but they keep running out of money, so every other building's a dope centre or a speakeasy or an anarchist bookshop. They don't work, the West Indian boys, they hang out on the street with reggae music thumping all day. It hasn't happened yet, but they look like they're up for it, the black boys. The way they look at the police. The way the police look back. The cops seem oddly rural and old-fashioned rather pale and bovine; they look well fed and scared. But the Rastas look fly. Even stoned, they look sharp.

The man who encouraged them, this Powell, soon disowned them and warned they'd kill us because they were breeding too many piccaninnies. Someone said you shouldn't use that word, and he said, No, no, it's an endearment, it's what my mother used to call me when she bounced me on her knee. Can that be right? Would you say 'Little doodums is going to grow up and kill us all with his machete'? Or: 'Darling possums is going to drown us in rivers of blood'? I don't think so, Mr Powell. Yet people were always saying how clever he was! Treble youknowwhat in Greek, Brigadier at age 19...

Then he didn't say anything about West Indians at all any more. He seems instead at the time of writing to be devoting the rest of his life to a syntactical challenge: to speak on the radio for fifteen minutes twice a week without saying 'um' or 'er'. Same Wolves whine, same delusional content, but grammatically accurate, even when, as he gets bound up in his clauses, his self-imposed challenge involves adding convolution upon anfractuosity 'Pelion upon Ossa', as I've heard him put it to bring the sentence to a 'correct' conclusion. Weird. More than weird. Demented. Poor West Indians poor, poor people, to have been answerable to that bloke.

They'd be much happier going home, don't you think? They're trying to have a street culture in the pouring rain. It's tragic. If we paid for them to come, why can't we pay for them to go back those who want to? Expatriation, repatriation, why take offence at a prefix? Why worry, if you end up where you want to be and someone else has paid for the trip? Then we'd know that those who stayed preferred it here and we could stop feeling guilty about it and they'd stop feeling sorry for themselves.

That's not considered an acceptable point of view, by the way. To whom is it not acceptable? To the politicians politicians, oddly enough.

I was having all these thoughts as I walked back to the 1100, talking to myself. Then I drove home.

I pulled over just off Praed Street to listen to the end of Graham Parker singing 'stick to Me' at max volume on the car stereo. I almost jumped through the roof when a hopeful tom rapped on my window and stuck her fat face against the gla.s.s. I had to drive round the block a couple of times till I reached the end of the tape.

There's been a development at work. The magazine, which is doing quite well considering half its contributors can't spell, has offered to take me onto the staff. This involves a salary my first. They say they'll pay me 5,000 a year. This is 2,000 more than I grossed last year. That's an increase of 66 per cent, which even in Mr Callaghan's banana republic is somewhat above the rate of inflation.

Unfortunately, going on the payroll would mean paying tax at source, and although I haven't done the sums exactly, I think I'd only end up with roughly 3,500, so my raise in real terms would be only 500, from which I'd have to pay my fares to work in Covent Garden. I'd also have to spend time in the office talking to semiliterate Stalinists.

I don't know how I became a journalist. It's not something I ever set out to do, though now I've done it I can see that it suits me temperamentally quite well. The other thing about journalism is that although at the top end (not at my mag, obviously) it seems to attract well educated, even intelligent, people, it's basically quite unbelievably easy. You ask a question and write down the answer. You repeat the process a few times. Then you see what all the answers add up to, put them in sequential order with a simple linking narrative and go to the pub.

Even Batley could manage it, I should think. Even Plank Robinson could have done it. (Actually, maybe not Plank.) Anyway, I went into the office, which is an old print works, suitably enough, off Endell Street and had a talk with the news editor, a woman called Jan Something. I suggested going out to lunch, but she recoiled as though I'd propositioned her. Luckily I'd stopped en route for two pints and a blue pill downstairs in the cellar bar of the Oporto, on the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue, where a table of what I took to be military publishers were discussing print runs (small).

The mag office was completely open-plan with long trestle tables, piles of paper, typewriters and posters for rock concerts stuck to the bare brick walls. Unwashed mugs cl.u.s.tered on the top of filing cabinets. I could imagine everyone being too feminist or on their dignity to wash up. There were clouds of f.a.g smoke from young men who were stuck to curly-wired phones. No sooner were they off one call than they dialled another. Flickwhizzgrind went the office pen as it turned in the number hole; urrgrrrwhrr went the dial as it countered back to zero. There was one office separated by a gla.s.s part.i.tion perhaps the editor's den, though there was no one in it. The wooden floorboards were stacked high with newspapers, rival magazines, Rolling Stone, Time Out, Boulevard Rolling Stone, Time Out, Boulevard; the work tables themselves were buried under typing paper, carbons, cuttings snipped from other publications, stacks of London phone books the slim buff A AD, the fat pink E EK and so on. An air of agreeable studenty endeavour hung over the whole place. and so on. An air of agreeable studenty endeavour hung over the whole place.

I did a deal with the Jan person that I didn't have to go into the office more than twice a week: once on Thursday for 'conference', when we discussed what would be in the next issue and once on a Monday to deliver my 'copy' i.e. articles and catch up on anything that had come in. The rhythm of the week was good because it meant that I did all my writing at the weekend, which could otherwise be so difficult to fill. The phone calls and 'research' I did on Thursday and Friday. Tuesday and Wednesday I generally took off.

Jan also mentioned 'expenses'. This turned out not to mean a corner table at the White Tower, but reasonable reimburs.e.m.e.nt, on production of receipts, for directly work-related costs such as bus fares or photocopying. We haggled over the home phone bill and I won.

'Cheers,' she said as I left, 'and don't forget you're seeing Matt and I on Monday.'

I thought for a moment she'd said 'matineye', an East End p.r.o.nunciation of 'matinee'. Was I meant to review it?

Then I remembered Matt was the production editor.

'Me won't forget,' me muttered as me went downstairs.

Wednesday afternoon is cinema time. It's usually the one at the top of Queensway, near the Porchester library, sometimes the Gate in Notting Hill, or occasionally I take the 1100 down to Fulham, have eggs florentine and a litre of house red in Pica.s.so's on the King's Road then go to the Fulham Road ABC. I usually take a hip flask in to numb my critical faculty. (I'd drained it within the first half hour of Julia Julia.) I still like the cinema, however bad the films. Cowboy pictures I could never handle as a child, except The Magnificent Seven The Magnificent Seven; for the rest, the costume and setting (dust, cacti, one-horse town) were too dull, and the older men looked silly in those hats, like bank managers dressed up. I really hated the identikit curly hairstyle of the obligatory woman in crinolines and the arch way she descended the steps to the bar, derailing the plot. For pulp, I preferred horror. I never failed to respond to moonlight to hound dogs, long metal bell pulls, virgins in white dresses, blood on the teeth.

American cop thrillers are bad because you can't hear what they say, and often the story turns on a side-of-the-mouth remark, indecipherable, that the stand-in was a fake or that the plant was working for the others. And the trouble with almost all 'thrillers' is that they don't thrill; who but a child, who in their right mind, would care whether in the end they get the bullion out through Helsinki before the timer detonates the bomb in Berlin?

I still watch, though.

I engage with the story in my own way. I inhabit the sets. And I wear their clothes; I like the feel of them. I move house to the apartment in Santa Monica where Steve McQueen's girlfriend lives. I make out with her room-mate. I wear Steve's shoulder holster and drink with his buddy. I note the way he changes gear in the Ford Mustang GT-390 and feel the nub of the shift in my palm, long after I've ceased to follow or care which villain dumped which in the concrete overcoat and which one I'm waiting for at the airport, which one's going to feel my hand on his shoulder when he comes barrelling through off the Miami flight.

These are things that help me if not lose then leave behind, what else, my self.

I was immune to the recent big-deal film, Sat.u.r.day Night Fever Sat.u.r.day Night Fever, though Stellings told me he thought there was 'something definitely going on' in the t.i.tle song. I like the Curzon because the seats are lush and few other cinema-goers choose the afternoon to see foreign pictures. I saw A Woman Under the Influence A Woman Under the Influence there, a film by John Ca.s.savetes. I admired the woman and I didn't see that she was as crazy as the others seemed to think. It was strong, repet.i.tive, gripping though there were moments when you could see the boom dropping in at the top of the shot! I never made that mistake, even as a stand-in sound man on Stewart Forres's film. How bad would that have been? If Jennifer's protests when she was being 'raped' by Alex Tanner had been made into a visible microphone just above her head? there, a film by John Ca.s.savetes. I admired the woman and I didn't see that she was as crazy as the others seemed to think. It was strong, repet.i.tive, gripping though there were moments when you could see the boom dropping in at the top of the shot! I never made that mistake, even as a stand-in sound man on Stewart Forres's film. How bad would that have been? If Jennifer's protests when she was being 'raped' by Alex Tanner had been made into a visible microphone just above her head?

I feel good when I leave the darkness of the cinema. It makes me feel my life is important. For a few minutes I stroll along the dark streets, thinking of myself as someone in a film a man with a character, a destiny. I become aware of my clothes and my physical ma.s.s; of my quiddity, my value.

Gradually the feeling wears off, and I feel swamped again by the inexplicable pettiness of being alive.

I feel my sense of who I am drowned out by static. On the street, in the world, there's too much extraneous filth and air and words.

I don't find life unbearably grave. I find it almost intolerably frivolous.

A lot of time has pa.s.sed.

Is that good? I never know. I haven't stopped to reflect and write, and that suggests that I've been busy.

Busy is is good, isn't it? Busy means we're hard at it, achieving our ends or 'goals'. Haven't had time to stop, or look around or think. That's considered the sign of a life well lived. Although people complain of it another year gone, where did that one go? tacitly, they're proud. Otherwise they wouldn't do it: you put your time where your priority is. good, isn't it? Busy means we're hard at it, achieving our ends or 'goals'. Haven't had time to stop, or look around or think. That's considered the sign of a life well lived. Although people complain of it another year gone, where did that one go? tacitly, they're proud. Otherwise they wouldn't do it: you put your time where your priority is.

Suppose, though, you're not sure that what you're doing is at all worthwhile. Suppose you blundered into it over a spoonful of lime pickle. It's easy, it pays quite well. But really it's a distraction. It stops you thinking about what you ought to be doing.

Because what you really ought to be doing is weighing up the facts. If the history of h.o.m.o sapiens h.o.m.o sapiens so far were represented as a single day, an average human lifespan would represent a little over half a second. That's your lot, that's all you have of living, then you return to the unconscious eternity that came before and will close back over you over your half-second. If the so far were represented as a single day, an average human lifespan would represent a little over half a second. That's your lot, that's all you have of living, then you return to the unconscious eternity that came before and will close back over you over your half-second. If the whole whole history of the earth (not just the brief history of the earth (not just the brief h.o.m.o sap h.o.m.o sap era) were represented as one day then your existence would be too small to measure. No sufficiently imaginative chronometer exists. era) were represented as one day then your existence would be too small to measure. No sufficiently imaginative chronometer exists.

So what you must do being an intelligent, thinking creature is make a very careful, well-informed judgement about how best you can spend your one and only half-second. You a.n.a.lyse yourself and your abilities; you match them to the world, its ways and possibilities, and you make a solemn decision to do what would most contribute to the well-being of the world and of yourself.

Except you've got a deadline, Friday at noon. And your lover coming round on Tuesday. And there's football on.

This 'busy' thing isn't a commitment, it's an evasion.

And what are we avoiding? Facing the problem of the one half-second. Because if that's really how it is, if that's time, then nothing is worthwhile and nothing makes sense.

If time is not not really like that, then all might yet work out. And in fact good news we do believe time is not linear. The trouble is bad news that our brains can only really like that, then all might yet work out. And in fact good news we do believe time is not linear. The trouble is bad news that our brains can only think think of it as linear, therefore we're doomed to see our lives as pointless. of it as linear, therefore we're doomed to see our lives as pointless.

It's funny, really. The most intelligent creature that's evolved so far (we think) has a design flaw at the heart of its superior intelligence. It can't grasp one of the dimensions it inhabits.

It's as though we had longitude, but no lat.i.tude. How then would we navigate or reckon our position on the earth?

We're deaf men working as musicians; we play the music but we can't hear it.

I see that a woman called Marguerite Walls has been found murdered in Leeds. It's almost a year since the death of the last of these women in Yorkshire and the feeling, or hope, was that the killer had packed it in. It's been a feature of life since I've lived in London: every three months or so another prost.i.tute has been found dead in a red-light back alley in the merged badlands of Leeds and Bradford. Over the years, our magazine had done at least three long features on it.

This victim was found in a garden, half-hidden under gra.s.s cuttings and leaves. She'd been strangled, though, where the previous ones had been stabbed; she was in Farsley, not in itself a dodgy district; and, most important of all, she was not a prost.i.tute. Ms Walls was a 47-year-old civil servant at the Department of Education and Science.

The police are therefore saying that this killing is unrelated to the long, squalid sequence that goes back to 1975. The modus operandi (as the, presumably Latin-speaking, West Yorkshire plods insist on calling it) is different; the area is one the killer hasn't been in before and the victim wasn't a pro. They are therefore looking for 'someone other' than the serial killer and since they don't know who he is yet, this new one's very 'other' indeed.

I wouldn't be so sure if I were them. This killer isn't as perfect as the papers make out. It's possible that as many as eight of his 20 intended victims so far have survived. That's not the work of someone who's exactly on top of things, is it? That's an a.s.sault-to-death conversion rate of only 60 per cent. Plus, Farsley, as any map will tell you, is very close to his centre of gravity. Suppose he was on his way to Chapeltown to find a prost.i.tute to kill. Then maybe he saw this poor woman walking home and he couldn't wait. If you're mad enough to have killed a dozen people you're mad enough to be a fraction impatient. Surely?

But the police 'psychologists' now have pride and money riding on their theories. They're so attached to their patterns that they've forgotten rule one of human behaviour: there are no patterns. People just do things. There's no such thing as a coherent and fully integrated human personality, let alone consistent motivation.

They know from footprints at several crime scenes that the guy's got a size seven shoe with severe uneven wear on the ball of the right foot, suggesting that he drives long-haul for a living. Every survivor says he has a dark beard. He left a new five-pound note, serial number AW51 121565, at the site of the murder of Jean Jordan, a prost.i.tute whose head he had tried to cut off, in 1977. The new note went into payrolls in the heart of his area of operations on the day before the murder. The only way they think it can have crossed the Pennines within 24 hours, to Manchester, where Jean Jordan was killed, is if the man who had it in his pay packet took it with him.

The bank supplied the note in a payroll, though surprisingly it can't say which one. It might have gone to one of 30 companies in the area, and thence to one of 8,000 men.

But how many of those 30 firms are haulage companies, employing drivers? Maybe three? How many drivers in that total? Maybe a hundred? How many of those drivers are of medium height with black beards? Eight? Five? How many of those don't have bulletproof alibis for every night in question? Two? One?

Circ.u.mstantial evidence, eyewitness evidence, footprints, serial numbers... How much more do they want? How difficult is is this? this?

Sometimes I don't do pubs in the evening, sometimes I go to wine bars. There are certain ones that have a reputation for being places you can pick up girls. For instance there's one called the Loose Box, which Stellings told me about. I'm not sure he's ever been there, I think he just liked the name. It's in Knightsbridge. I made the mistake of going there on a Thursday lunchtime. It had women all right, but they didn't want to sleep with you. They were people who'd come up for the day from Gloucestershire to go shopping; they'd come to look at curtain fabrics in Harrods, to go to drapery and get the little men in shiny suits with shiny hair to haul down the heavy bolts of chintz. I listened to them as I stood at the bar. They had a 'light' lunch, but they talked one another into white wine, and it's cheaper by the bottle.

In the evening, it was different. No one sat down and no one ate. There wasn't room for tables because the floor s.p.a.ce was jammed with groups of young women shouting and smoking round a bottle of searingly dry white wine. Men in ones and twos worked through them, occasionally managing to detach a single woman from her group. Some men carried bottles at the ready. They persevered, though few had much to offer at first sight: many were grey, had thick sideburns or wore ties with the designer's name printed on the front.

I was standing near two women in their thirties. One wore leopardskin-print trousers, the other a miniskirt. They appraised the men, while trying to seem absorbed by one another; occasionally they pointed or conferred.

You sensed a man's anxiety when he had to return to the bar and shove and wave folded banknotes at the keeper of the lacerating Muscadet; by the time he'd got wine and forced his way back to the woman he'd prised away, her group had recombined, made new unstable combinations and his girl was blocked: a man with a camel coat over his shoulders was dangling Jaguar keys and making her simper.

After an hour of standing next to the same two women, I knew that no one had yet spoken to them. I suppose I'd drunk a bottle and a half of the house red by then, and I said something to the one in the leopardskin trousers. She gave a single-word answer. I offered her and her friend a drink from my bottle and they backed off as though appalled as though I'd suggested that they'd come to this seething, deafening room on Friday night to be what was that expression to be... picked up picked up! They turned their backs on me. I left the remainder of the bottle on the corner of the bar and went back to the 1100. I thought of pulling over in Star Street, rolling down the window to a waiting tom and asking her to get inside. It might have been worth it just to see her face; it might have been worth it just to see if she'd say, 'What do you take take me for?' me for?'

Last weekend Julie came up to stay for a couple of days. She's nineteen years old now and works in the brewery offices. The 'signs of promise' at school didn't come to much and my mother needed more money to help with the house. I met her at the station and walked her over to my room.

'It's nice, Mike,' she said, turning round in the small s.p.a.ce, looking for somewhere to put her bag down.

'I'm getting somewhere bigger soon,' I said. 'With my big new salary.'

I made some tea while she sat on the bed.

'Where's the toilet?'

'At the end of the landing. Here. Take this.' I threw her a roll of paper. At least I didn't, like the landlord of the Tickell Arms, make her pay for it.

She wanted to watch Jim'll Fix It Jim'll Fix It on television, and I made some tea while a whey-faced lad from Bolton got to spend the day as a steward on a cruise ship going to the Norwegian fjords. on television, and I made some tea while a whey-faced lad from Bolton got to spend the day as a steward on a cruise ship going to the Norwegian fjords.

'Can I meet your friends, Mike?'

'I'm not sure if anyone's around this weekend,' I said. 'How's Mum?'

'Oh, you know. Up and down.'

Jules seemed a bit nervous. She was sipping tea from a Beecham's mug I'd been given at a press conference.

'When did you last come to London?' I said.

'I've only been the once. You know that, Mike. That time we all came up. When Dad was still alive. When we went to Madame Whatsits.'

'I remember.'

'And you bought me that model of a bus.'

'Did I?'

'Yes. You were always generous.'

I wondered where I'd got the money. 'You gave me nice presents, too.'

'Remember the Donny Osmond tee shirt? Mum was a bit shocked!'

She was wearing a cheap skirt that was tight across her knees as she perched on the edge of the bed.

I felt terribly sorry for her with her funny little face and the wavy hair that she'd had cut like the dark one in Abba too long and with too many layers. She had a velvet choker and a tight sweater and clumpy shoes.