Sixteen

His vision was jerky, unable to fix on anything. Instead, his eyes flicked about and took in fragments of things on the street. Short of breath and clumsy, he repeatedly tripped over paving stones or veered drunkenly as if unused to walking upright. By trying desperately to move away from the other pedestrians, he was somehow drawn off-balance towards them. He became enraged and wanted to shout.

He should not be in London. But he had damned himself to it with some vague romantic foolishness about art. He’d stranded himself here. Shipwrecked himself among the dreadful screeching of the apes.

It could be felt as much as observed; this alteration in the environment, in the very atmosphere. Wherever people congregated in the street, in this drizzly cold, lit only by street lamps and flickers of fluorescence, outside the little supermarkets and off-licences, fast-food restaurants and dreary pubs, he felt a total aversion. Some invisible contamination made his guts seasick with nerves. Some kind of unseen pressure, perhaps electrical, filled his head with a buzzing static noise, indecipherable transmissions or echoes of somewhere else, but now here too, as if he travelled beneath or between what everyone else was experiencing.

But it was hard to describe exactly how the world had altered. Only a visual vocabulary would suffice. Did he have the clarity? His sketches were probably nothing more than gibberish and graffiti. And wouldn’t that be the worst frustration of all: to be at last presented with some insight into the true nature of things – a truth so blurred by the media, by education, by these endless social systems and codes, the benign totalitarianism that distorted existence – and yet to find his new perception incommunicable?

When he finally reached the tube station, Seth leant against a tiled wall to roll a cigarette; he was unable to speak when a beggar asked him for a smoke. He had forgotten how. His lips moved but the triad of vocal cord, tongue and jaw refused to coordinate. He swallowed and then produced a rasp.

He wondered why he was here. What had compelled him to leave his room again. His original purpose was lost to him.

The blue light of the cash machines and the red and white illumination of the Angel underground station stimulated some vague anticipation of travel. He briefly gravitated towards the lights, but was soon warded off by the crowds pouring out of the tunnels.

He moved past the station but was halted by an impassable crossroads of hurtling traffic, slapping winds and jostling elbows. It all vibrated through his bones. A crowd waited for the lights to change. But no amount of perfume could disguise the fishy-vinegar reek of the women. Had he once thought these creatures attractive? There was something physically wrong with all of them. Lipless, protruding eyes, overlapping teeth, misshapen noses. Ears too red, discoloration of the skin under make-up, pink-rimmed eyelids, calcified hair. Seth shuddered. The men fared no better with their apelike swaggering, wet dog nostrils and blunt shark eyes. Intimidating, dangerous animals with a brute strength increasing its potential to explode as every drink was quaffed. Murder beasts reeking of dung-straw and brewer’s yeast.

Seth didn’t manage to cross the road; a moment’s hesitation, and another flash flood of cars, bikes and buses shook past, further blurring the smudgy buildings with their headlights, and leaving him stranded on the pavement.

It was as if he had been abandoned in a foreign city without a map and failed to understand a single word spoken. An overwhelming desire to be free of London made him shake with frustration. Anything, even to be penniless in another town, was better than merely existing, baffled and buffeted, in this unfeeling place.

Head down and defeated, he moved away from the traffic. He couldn’t go back along the Essex Road; there were too many people down there. He’d slip back through the adjacent side streets. But as he tried to remember a route home, he spied an empty-looking bar set underneath an ugly concrete office building. Maybe he could shelter in there, in a quiet corner by a radiator, and drink whisky.

Already it was as if he could feel and taste the fiery, revitalizing liquid in his cheeks and throat. He moved towards the door of the bar and lingered outside. There was music inside and one or two loud voices trying to rise above some other noise. The idea of entering made him anxious, as if such a move was no longer an easy thing to accomplish. And even if he could reach the bar, he wondered if he would be able to speak. After whispering his own name down and into the lapel of his coat, Seth pushed the door open.

It was like walking onto a well-lit stage. His instant immersion into bright light and sound made him giddy and afraid. A lump formed in his throat. Gingerly, keeping his eyes down, he concentrated on placing one foot in front of the other in case he crashed down among the tables and chairs. At the bar he looked up, doleful and insecure, and waited to be served.

There were only a handful of people in the scruffy place, and all gathered around a giant video screen to watch a football match. He was glad of the distraction; it saved him from attracting their eyes.

He looked dreadful, he realized the moment he saw his disgraceful reflection in the mirror underneath the optics; pale and creased and stained and downtrodden. He cringed with shame. But it had been a long time, nearly a year, since his appearance mattered. He could see the results of a chronic inattention to grooming, diet and lifestyle. There was a miserable and lined aspect to his mouth. His eyes had shrunk to tiny, hard things, set deep in the bruised skin of the sockets, as thin as tracing paper. There was an unnatural lividity to his complexion too, the only colour provided by the networks of broken blood vessels across his cheekbones. He looked sixty, not thirty-one. This was a death mask. He saw callousness, despair, revulsion, the loss of all hope and all compassion. His face was the one true work of art he’d created in the last year: a detailed and living representation of the city.

At a corner table away from the other customers, his euphoria for escape grew with every shot of whisky downed. Sipping at speed, the glass was never out of his hand or far from his mouth. The alcohol made his thoughts go faster. And he could no longer think of a single reason to stay in London. It had been a rapid and grim descent from day one. Uneventful months smudged into each other to become a year; a long, dismal and greyish smear of existence. A year in which he had ended up barely civilized, almost inhuman, like the others.

But it had always appeared impossible to get out of the city. And improbable that he could change this life, or slow the momentum of decline, with so many things conspiring against him. He’d never been able to find the time between night shifts to organize himself. It was not possible to think clearly with so many thoughts, so many memories, so many scenes playing out in his imagination. The whirlwind in his skull had always kept him rooted to his chair, or perched at the end of his bed, smoking. And perhaps he’d resisted the only true alternative – a shame-faced return to Mother’s spare room – out of a conviction that it would destroy him. But little was left to be destroyed. At least there he could recuperate, stop working nights, catch up on sleep. On so much sleep. He could change this debilitating pattern, rediscover his will, regain some enthusiasm. Yes, he saw it all in the fifth glass of whisky. Going home was not so bad. He wouldn’t fool himself a moment longer: getting out was now simply his only chance of survival.

He’d phone his mother the following day, and then hand in his notice at Barrington House in the evening. Then get out. So easy it seemed, on that stool in the bar. The smile on his face felt strange. Stiff. These features had moved so little of late. He suspected the tiny muscles of his face had atrophied.

He stabbed out a cigarette in the ashtray and hastily dropped his tobacco and lighter into the side pocket of his overcoat.

Outside, he experienced a sudden trepidation at the mere thought of returning to his room. He worried the familiar torpor would overwhelm him once he was back at the Green Man. That the same urgency for escape could be gone tomorrow afternoon when he woke after a long, dead sleep.

He had to act right now, tonight. Start packing. Anything. Already he sensed the aperture through which he must escape was closing. The rain, the blowing litter, the wet stones, the endless thoroughfare – these were all ropes intent on binding him with knots that his cold fumbling fingers could only paw at ineffectually.

Bowing his head, Seth pushed out at the wind. Huddled into himself, he made mental lists of tasks to be completed. At least he had some money in the bank. His wages were pitiful, but he’d stopped spending money on anything but food a long time ago. There was enough in his current account to get him out, back home, and to tide him over for a few months.

Perhaps, he thought later, had he been allowed to get back to his room at the Green Man without delay that night, all would have been well; he would have followed through with these plans and saved himself. And saved the others too.

But as he walked past the overflowing bags of soiled clothes and broken children’s toys left outside a charity shop, his future was decided.

All of the motion and light in his mind was instantly obliterated.

For a moment he was not sure of anything – which way was up, which way down, which direction he was facing, where his arms and legs were. His entire body was weightless until his shoulder hit the window of the charity shop.

Inside the shop, unwanted teddy bears, a tiny porcelain teapot and a book about cats all shuddered on their shelves. He had been thrown against the window. When the cold glass slapped his face, the world and its dimensions reassembled around him.

Bent over, looking down, off-balance on unsteady legs, it was then he saw the shoes on the wet pavement. Three pairs of whitish trainers surrounding him.

Suddenly he was upright again, wheeling backwards on both feet, throwing his arms into the air, chin raised. Inside he was all white and jerky, but the left side of his head felt different: it was a gigantic numbness.

The cold was forgotten, the cyclone of mental listings vanished. His darting eyes tried to assess the situation and size up all those involved.

‘Cunt,’ a gingery mouth said from nearby.

‘Come on. Fuckin’ come on,’ a dark face barked from under the peak of a baseball cap.

Their eyes were full of cruelty, and a strange anticipation too, as if they were impatient for a predictable reply. Both of the assailants were in their late teens. And Seth had seen the gingery youth before, slurping arrogantly from a bottle of Diamond White cider he later smashed outside the betting shop. The third one he couldn’t see, but sensed him behind, standing too close.

There was a moment of silence – a suspension of everything – and then the world was a rustling of nylon sleeves as a salvo of punches from small hard fists came in at him.

The first blow hit his cheekbone but didn’t hurt. He took the second punch against his forehead and the third impacted against the side of his neck. His head flicked back and forth, but the punches made no sound and there was no pain at first. It felt like he was being pushed by different hands while trying to move in a straight line. For some reason he tried to walk away as if nothing was happening. This made his assailants really angry.

More rustling, more prodding fists and kicking feet made all the strength drain out of Seth’s arms and legs. He couldn’t feel his hands or feet. He said ‘Fuck off’ in a weak voice without thinking. Warm air filled his body and he felt buoyant. He seemed to weigh nothing.

But inside his head something slapped around his skull like an animal trapped in a cave. It made him feel sick and so scared he would have done anything to become one of the unwanted teddy bears on the shelves of the charity shop, instead of this – a piece of meat to be kicked, punched and tenderized by the white trainers and red knuckles.

He couldn’t speak. His eyes were flicking everywhere but not fixing on anything. Then he was yanked around by small iron fingers, and the knocking from side to side started again. The gingery kid in the white Tommy Hilfiger jacket was flailing his arms at Seth so fast it was as if he was afraid his target would disappear before he got his freckled knuckles into its face.

Twisting and ducking, Seth took most of the punches on his shoulders, the back of the head, against an elbow, and in the ribs. But now they began to hurt.

He jumped at a space between the flailing arms to get away, but a hand seized the collar of his overcoat and kept him upright so his face would remain exposed to the flurry of fists.

He made a sound like a crying baby. He tried to think what he might have done to make them so savage. Nothing could explain the urgency of their fists and feet. There just wasn’t enough time for them to properly destroy another human being. Gravity slowed them down and infuriated them.

When a coal-black fist hit Seth’s teeth, his head filled with cracking ice. Linen ripped inside his mouth. The same hand came in again, again, again. The smudgy, jerking world disintegrated into bright white motes, all falling downwards.

I’ll die. They’re not going to stop until I’m dead. Seth went cold. His eyes were full of water. There was something crackling and tingling inside his nose. A big loop of spit and blood came out of his lips, to be smashed flat against his cheek.

He thought of trying to jump away from the fists again, but the thought never became action. It was getting hard to think of anything.

‘Cunt! Cunt! Cunt! Cunt!’

Their breathing became grunting. They were trying to punch and kick so fast they were getting tired and slow. In his dark upside-down world, lightning was flashing.

When Seth fell over, they stopped shouting ‘Cunt!’ But as he lay on the unforgiving pavement, he heard a whinny of excitement from one of them.

Another one hurt his foot with the first kick. The other two began a scuffling, kicking kind of dance, putting their toes into Seth’s face, shoulders, back, thighs, stomach. It was the stomach they wanted most.

Seth tried to get to his knees. The panicked child in his mind was screaming now.

Was it never going to end? The kicking just went on and on. Both of his legs were dead from the thigh down and one arm had become useless. The pain in his ribs stopped him from moving. Had splintered bones speared his purple organs inside? He could see it all inside his shrinking mind.

So that’s it, a tiny voice said inside the white sphere in the middle of the darkness, where all of him had withdrawn. Soon, it’ll just all be black. This is how it ends. And then, close by, beyond the swollen, hot darkness of clenched eyelids and hands over face, he heard a bus shudder and wheeze to a stop. Feet then slapped down to the pavement from the platform.

Saviours were coming to drag these hyenas off, to call the police and an ambulance, to make him comfortable on the ground with a jacket under his head. Warm hope expanded the tiny sphere of consciousness inside his skull. He almost cried out with relief. But then he heard the bus drive off, and the stamping resumed.

All that kicking in soft training shoes was hurting their toes. It was much better to stamp a cushioned sole down onto a body. So they smashed him flat. Bent his arms and legs. Compacted an ear into his head and made it hot and whistley. Ripped hair out from the root with rubbery training shoe traction that made a sticky-tape sound; these soles were designed to grip in all weather conditions.

Someone walked past, stopped, and then sang, ‘Easy, easy, easy,’ in a lazy though joyous voice. The stampers stamped. The final kicks hurt the most; the second to last one pushed his belly into his throat and made his eyes pop.

When they were finished, worn out, limping from kicking a body so hard, they swaggered away, tired, euphoric, and fulfilled.

It was too hard for his mind to register all of the parts of his body that were damaged, so it flooded the whole of him with a fluid warmth. And, impossibly, he stood up with no trouble at all from broken bones. He looked down at his body. Not too bad, he thought. Dirty and wet from being kicked around the pavement, but no blood or meat on the bone. There seemed only to be footprints from the stamping, criss-cross brandings from the soles of their footwear. He felt almost disappointed that he had nothing to show for his labours; nothing to show the jury. But when Seth decided to walk, the idea never got past his hips. And all the stabbing hell of bodily pain rushed into the marrow of his bones.

He fell down.

Then dragged his broken-doll body into a shop doorway.

Too scared to move in case the white heat of pain grew any worse, he lost track of time, slumped in the porch of the charity shop. He wanted to puke and weep at the same time. He was waiting for the ambulance, the police. They must have been called. So many people were on that bus. Scores of feet had walked past since he’d been on the ground, since those dirty feet had finished their kicking and stamping.

A little rocking back and forth seemed to ease the pain for a while, until it made things worse. There was no way to sit or lie down without the agony swelling up like a gigantic wave. The skin of his face was hot and tender and tight because of the huge lumps growing out of his head – lumps that were hard like bone. To breathe he sucked in shallow whispers of air because his ribs felt as though they had been smashed like old wooden banisters and the splinters had gone everywhere. His left hand was numb and his right knee had grown as big as a deformed vegetable made out of salty, fibrous flesh. That leg could not be bent, and even the weight of his jeans and the shoe on that foot hurt it terribly; it might never bend again. The right side of his neck was raw and sticky.

People continued to walk past in the rain. They sped up when near him. Twice he called out for help. Two girls looked at him, but walked on, their pace quickening after they had seen his ruined face. Could they see the big black crack in his skull? It was there, he could feel it. All of his soft pink-grey brain was pushing at it, trying to get out and into the air after decades caged inside its watery prison. The stamping feet had tried to free that tortured organ. He wanted to get to a hospital and be injected with morphine.

His breathing sped up at one point and he passed out, then woke up dizzy and was sick down his coat. When the choking terror passed, he rose to his good knee. Using his numb hand and letting the uninjured knee take the weight, he pushed himself up against the glass door. It was about half a mile to the Green Man. It could take all night, and he was sure he could slip into a coma at any time. He would call for help from his room if he could make it that far.

He briefly closed his eyes to recover from the exertion of standing, but was made quickly alert again by the sound of feet coming from the left. A burly shape staggered up to him and thrust out a hand. Seth flinched and jumped back at the same time, crashing against the door of the charity shop.

‘Yer man down there is too fine to drink wi’ the likes of you and me. But I’ll tell you something. And I’ll tell you for nothing. ’ The tramp’s face was a mess of scar tissue and broken veins. Each eye looked in a different direction. His smell was choking; alcohol, scrotal rot, unfathomable layers of sweat in second-hand wool. A black can was shoved under Seth’s nose. He moved his head to one side and breathed out through the side of his mouth.

The tramp was standing too close, leaning in, spitting on his face as he talked about ‘yer man’. Who was yer man? Seth was confused. The soiled arm of the tramp went around Seth’s neck. There was a sleeve patterned with grey and red diamonds, brown and unravelling at the wrist. The pain of that dreadful wool on his neck made him cry out. ‘I’ve been attacked. I’ve been fucking attacked. Don’t touch me. Don’t hold my neck.’

But the tramp wasn’t listening; he just wanted to talk about ‘yer man’ and to spray his rotten breath all over Seth’s bleeding face.

Dragging his straight leg behind him, his head bowed in concentration, Seth lurched away from the vagrant and began the hardest and most exhausting journey of his life, where every crack in the paving stones or slight incline in the road registered in every damaged nerve and made his skin repeatedly coat itself in cold sweat. The tramp, who had mistaken Seth for one of his own, followed him home, raving about ‘yer man’.

It was as if none of these events had been random. As if there was nothing coincidental or accidental about his fate that night; as if this was all the deliberate work of something in the city, or of the city itself. Whatever it was, this malign intelligence, it wanted him humiliated and reduced for daring to forsake it. It had been watching him. It knew he had few defences and claimed him for its own.

He began to sob. The tramp swung his arm around Seth’s swollen neck again and nearly pulled him down. He came close to passing out from the pain. No amount of punishment would ever be enough. To be kicked and stamped close to death was not enough for one night. He had to be dirtied as well. Assaulted by a madman with sweat that smelled of vomit. The night and its torments must now stretch forever because he had dared to defy the will of the city. Had planned to reject it, to reject the role and the misery it had bequeathed him.

‘I’ll fucking break every stone in two,’ he whispered to the damaged man in the rotten jumper. ‘I’ll bring the whole thing to its knees, I swear by almighty god. Then I’ll turn the fucking heap to rubble.’

The tramp laughed and offered him the black can. Seth had made contact. Broken through. Their eyes were the same. They spoke the same language now and shared the same secrets about the city.

This is what you get when you call 999 and asked for the police. There had been a long wait for someone to pick up the phone. Then a recorded message about all the operators being busy. Seth’s chest grew tight with an indigestion of frustration. The message was always clear: Don’t let anything go wrong or happen to you because there is no help, only the promise, the illusion of service. But surely this wasn’t the case with the police as well?

Seth hung up. Slammed the handset onto the receiver so hard the entire phone crashed down the side of the bookcase and bounced onto the floor.

Dumbfounded, bent over in pain, he rocked back and forth, cradling his ribs and a swollen hand. There were bitter tears until the weeping hurt and had to be stopped. Weeping uses the stomach muscles, the lungs, the throat, the face, even the spine: he never realized this until they were all too damaged to squeeze out the tears. His assailants had even denied him grief. He just had to take it, to be in pain, to not complain, to allow their empowerment.

Loose bleeding teeth filled his slack mouth. Blood bubbled over his lips. Fantasies were entertained. Red, wet ones in which the gingery weasel died slowly beneath Seth’s skull face; it was the last thing he would see, had any right to see. And a butchering for the black one, who held the collar of Seth’s coat so fists could break his teeth; equal opportunities for all the swaggering dog boys.

First he tried lying on the bed, but the pillows and mattress and bed linen felt like rope burns. Then he curled up against the radiator, but the floor was merciless. A chair offered no relief and standing up was agony. He crunched on handfuls of paracetamol, but they were like tiny firefighters, uselessly directing thin streams of water from the ground up and into roaring walls of flame that turned both solid and liquid into a gas of pain.

He could only comfort himself with visions of the next confrontation, after he had hunted them down. He must refuse to let time and the inevitable healing process soften his murderous resolve. He could not allow his mind to protect itself by repressing their faces. The dog faces. The animal yellow eyes.

Seth clawed around the dry carpet for paper and a pencil. One of his eyes was filling with smoke and jelly. He found it difficult to see the lines, the definition. The lights were too dim. And the sketch pad was too pitiful a canvas on which to placate his desire to capture these faces that kept rearing up in his mind; the universal faces of ignorance and cruelty.

He could settle for nothing less than a vast depiction of this parasite corrupting the flesh of mankind: the antithesis of reason and talent and progress. Such a work would need long, bold, primitive strokes; an absence of subtlety. Blue fists. Tommy Hilfiger. Raw meat. Gucci. Black gums. Stone Island. Yellow eyes. Rockport.

He wanted to roar like a lion on a cement floor. And bellow like a polar bear with yellow fur worn down to pink skin against the tiles of an enclosure in a zoo. The disgust must come. Let it drip down the walls. Scorch the ceiling black with hatred. Liberate rage. Forgiveness is overrated. Compassion is dead.

Seth opened the paint tins and went at the walls with wet hands.