She flapped. We seethed.
Finally she said, “The thing . . .”
Here it came.
“Yes?”
“You know, I always said to myself, if I go mad, I’ll like, you know, go with it? Because I figure if you’re mad then you can’t really do anything about it so you might as well just . . . It was a monster, wasn’t it?”
We wiped a dribble of fat off our nose. “That depends.”
“On what?”
“Your point of view. In the sense that it would have crushed the life out of you and you would have drowned in a sea of animal fats and other remains, yes, it was a monster. But it meant you no harm. You just happened to be there.”
“You killed it.”
“No.”
“I saw you, you spoke those words, magic words.”
“Brand names.”
“What?”
“Brand names. Waste collection companies. Geesink Norba, Accord, Onyx — they collect rubbish in the city.”
“But . . . you spoke their names and . . .”
“I spoke words that, unless you pay close attention to these things, have no meaning. People don’t pay attention to the rubbish men; they cross over to the other side of the street to avoid them. Geesink Norba . . . they are sounds on the air. Meaningless, unless you know how to look. I invoked an idea.”
“What do you mean, ‘invoked’?”
“Summoned. Commanded. Requested for the cost of a ten-pound note.”
“You’re some sort of wizard?”
“Some sort, yes.”
“So there’s magic? And wizards? And monsters?”
“Yes.”
“In Hoxton?”
“Well, yes.”
“Oh. And the thing that came? The dustbin truck?”
I tried my best. “There are . . . things in this world, made up of other things — ideas — that are given life just by the nature of that idea, by the nature of living, life making magic, magic coming out of the most ordinary, trivial bits of life. Like . . . like when you speak into the telephone and your words are life and passion and feeling and they’re in the wires and sooner or later the wires will come alive or else they’d burst, with all that thought and emotion in them . . . or like a dustbin truck, just one dustbin truck because we have no idea how much waste a city can produce, just one tidying up afterwards, asking nothing but a tenner at Christmas and your council tax, anonymous faces picking up anonymous crap that no one wants to pay any attention to and sooner or later you ignore so much, you turn your face away so much, don’t want to think about it so much that . . . even that gets life. Do you see? Furious, passionate life, waiting to be seen, cleaning up afterwards, struggling out of the shadows. And where there’s life, any life, anything that . . .”
I saw her face. She was crying.
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s a bit . . .” she mumbled, waving her hands uselessly. “It’s just . . . uh . . .”
I said, “My name’s Matthew.”
“Loren,” she whimpered.
“Where do you live, Loren?”
She flapped a hand in a general direction.
“Near?” I asked.
She nodded.
“With a shower and a lot of soap?”
She nodded again.
“Good. Let me take you home.”
It was a council block a few streets back from the canal. On the ground floor there were grey metal shutters nailed over the windows, and bars across the front doors. The windows on the higher floors had little balconies with dead flowers withering on them. The stairwell smelt of piss, the lifts were scarred on the inside with who knew what mad burning. She lived on the fifth floor. The lights were on in the flat to her left, and as we went by, the door was opened and a man in a white skullcap leant out.
“Loren!” he exclaimed. “He’s gone out again; I’m sorry.” Then his eyes fell over us, and his look turned to one of brief disgust followed by forced concern. “Are you all right? What happened?”
“Fine,” she mumbled, red puffy eyes and a swollen puffy voice. “Thank you, fine.”
There were three locks on her door. She fumbled with the keys, dropped them, picked them up again, unlocked the door. A narrow corridor, occupied 99 per cent by a black sports bike, all pumps and shallowness; a single bulb swinging from a low ceiling, lampshade long since lost. She waved me towards a kitchen the size of a cockroach’s cupboard and said, “You can help yourself to whatever you want.”
I looked at an array of empty pizza boxes and used tea bags.
She headed into the bathroom. As the shower went on, the boiler above the sink started rattling and roaring, shaking so hard I thought it would pull itself free from the wall. I made do with rubbing my hands on an old dishcloth and my face with some kitchen towel, until I just felt thinly slimy, rather than all-over glooped. From the kitchen window, I could see Hackney, low lights and uneven streets, council estates and long, Victorian-lamp-lit terraces, stretching away.
Loren emerged from the shower, disappeared into the bedroom. Her voice drifted to me: “You can use it, if you want.”
I wandered from the kitchen into a small living room, containing a single brown sofa and sunflower wallpaper that had never been a good idea, even before it started to peel. There were shoes everywhere — men’s shoes, and boys’, strewn in boxes and around every wall, and dirty clothes, tracksuits and baggy jumpers, messy old plates and fallen library books with catchy titles like
A door opposite the living room had, among a collection of posters featuring everything from dinosaurs to heaving models with extra-heaving bosoms, a sign written in big red letters — KEEP OUT. A boy then — a teenage boy.
“Take some of Mo’s clothes! Towel’s under the sink.” Loren’s voice carried from the bedroom.
Clearly Mo was not in residence. I opened the KEEP OUT door, and was hit by the smell of tomato ketchup and hair gel. I rummaged through the wardrobe until I found a T-shirt and a pair of trousers, both too big for me. Whoever, wherever Mo’s father was, he had clearly evolved from another breed of men.
The shower was at once the most pleasurable and most disgusting experience of our life. The water kept drifting from hot to cold, and only scalding hot and the application of half a bar of soap could remove the grease that wanted to cling to every part of our skin. Our hair was like raw slices of chicken in our slipping fingertips, and bubbles of white fat spun in the stained old plughole.
I changed into Mo’s clothes. In the kitchen Loren was wearing pyjamas, a dressing gown, and fluffy pink slippers. She leant pale-faced by the sink, cradling a hot mug of tea between her hands and looking at nothing. I raised my grease-spattered clothes. “Uh . . .”
“Just stick them in the washing machine, OK?”
I turned the machine up hot, threw in powder and watched it go. We do not understand why people who watch the workings of the washing machine are mocked. Meditation classes and serene chants have nothing on the slow turning of socks in soapy water.
She gave me a mug of tea and said, “Sorry, I don’t have any . . .”
“Thank you. This is fine.”
