With a Zero at its Heart. Charles Lambert
6
He’s looking for Christmas presents in an antique shop behind the station when he sees a small, black lacquered box with a hinged lid. On the lid is a row of Chinamen. Their robes are exquisitely traced in gold, their wise heads tiny ovals of ivory, inset, like split peas bleached to bone. They seem to be waiting to be received like supplicants before an invisible benefactor, some mandarin perhaps. Many years later, the box survives a fire, but the shine of its lacquer is destroyed and the fine gold lines that delineate the robes of the men are seared away. What’s left is the row of heads, like ghost balloons, tethered down by invisible cords to the general darkness.
7
He reads his work at an international poetry festival. The local paper calls him a small, bearded man with one earring, which is two parts false and two parts true. At the party that evening, horribly drunk, coked-up, he pretends to adore the work of a Scottish poet, whose shallow musings he despises, and ignores the two poets he most admires out of shyness and misplaced pride. These poets both die soon after, the first beneath a passing car, the second alone, choked by her own vomit. He feels accountable for their deaths. He takes the reading fee he has been given and uses it to buy a Bullworker – a contraption of wires and steel that will make him invincible.
8
Before leaving the country he buys himself a single-lens reflex camera. It is more than he can afford, but how else will they believe him? Without the lens his eye is drawn by what moves, by skin and sinew and eyes and mouths, by the shifting of an arm against a table or the way one shoulder lifts without the other, but he’s too inhibited to photograph what he sees. He’s scared it might answer him back. Through his lens, what he sees is the perfect empty symmetry of doors and windows, and the way light catches the concrete of a bollard a boy has been sitting on moments before, the light still there, the warmth refusing to be held.
9
They live in a rented house with a billiards room, a spiral staircase and a ghost. The local laundrette is filled with drunken Irish poets. It is cold, and getting colder daily. When they’re forced to move, traipsing knee-deep in snow through the back streets of London, they take a single trophy with them, a Chinese duck with a pewter body, and brass wings and beak. The duck splits into two across the middle; they use it to keep dope, papers, all they need to hold the misery of their failure at bay. It is their stash duck and they love it. Everything else from that time has gone, everything except the ghost. The ghost is alive inside the duck.
10
His father keeps his ties in a flat wooden box. Each tie is tightly rolled, with the wide end at its heart. There are ties of all widths, all styles. His father throws nothing away and will never leave the house without a tie. The ties are held in place by a wooden grille, placed over them before the lid is closed. His father dies and he finds himself with the box of ties, many of them gifts he has bought at airports or hurriedly in shops he would normally avoid. He opens the box and rolls the ties open across his bed, their silk and wool a reproach to him as they wait to be taken up and worn.
1
His first pair of long trousers are rust-coloured jeans his mother buys him from a catalogue. He’s ten years old, his legs are sweaty. He rolls the jeans up at the bottom, cowboy-style, and wears them with a brand-new green pullover from the same catalogue, then goes to play with his friend next door. He’s tense, excited. He feels that he has finally grown up. His friend’s mother opens the door to him, before calling up the stairs to tell her daughter he’s here. I hope you aren’t planning on doing anything dirty, she shouts, flicking ash into her free hand. Your little friend looks ready to muck out stables. He blushes. He hates the woman with all his heart.
2
He wants a velvet frock coat like the ones worn by The Kinks. He’s seen them in a shop down the road from Beatties, called Loo Bloom’s. He hadn’t noticed it before, but now he stands outside the window and stares at the mannequins for hours at a time. His favourite coat is burgundy crushed velvet, with metal buttons that go from the collar to the waist. He has no trousers he could wear it with, but that doesn’t matter, not yet. It will soon be Christmas. His mother hasn’t said no, which gives him hope. Christmas morning he unwraps a double-breasted jacket in dark green corduroy, which he hangs in his wardrobe that evening and will never wear again.
3
His friend next door has a room at the top of her house with chests full of clothes her family has collected. They spend whole days there dressing up, as pirates, duchesses, washerwomen, spies. Sometimes, alone in the house, they wander from room to room, inventing stories about themselves, inventing selves. One afternoon they leave the house. She’s chosen a cocktail dress that belonged to her mother, baggy at the chest, red stiletto heels. He is wearing a long gypsy skirt and a sort of bonnet that covers much of his face. If anyone stops them, they’ll say he’s her long-lost American aunt, but no one does. That evening, his father forbids him to see her and won’t say why.
4
It’s July but he still won’t take his blazer off. The playground is used by the first three forms; there are ninety boys in all. He is one of the youngest. They all have the same school uniform, grey trousers, white shirt, brown blazer with the brown-and-yellow badge, and yellow-and-brown striped tie. Even the socks have a brown-and-yellow stripe around the top. At morning break they’re allowed to remove their blazers and tuck their ties into their shirts, but he stands at the edge and watches the other boys in their white shirts and grey trousers, the younger ones like him still in shorts, and he won’t take his blazer off. He feels safer with it on. He is sweating.
5
He roots through his mother’s clothes until he finds one of her tops, a fine wool crew-neck pullover, salmon pink, identical to one Keith Richards is wearing in the November number of his Rolling Stones fan club magazine. He holds it against himself in front of his mother’s dressing-table mirror, then takes it into the bathroom to try it on. It’s cold, there’s no heating in the house. He shivers as he takes off his shirt and pulls his vest over his head. He puts on the top. His nipples poke out like disgusting unripe strawberries. He rips the top off and screws it into a ball, throws it behind the toilet. He’ll be in trouble but he doesn’t care.
6
He gets a Saturday morning job at Skinner’s hardware store, selling garden implements, screws and nails, buckets and brooms, household objects of various kinds. When he’s saved enough he buys a pair of genuine Levi 501s, a size too large because they’re supposed to shrink to fit. He gets them home and locks himself in the bathroom, fills the bathtub with water as hot as he can bear, strips to his skin, then puts on the jeans. They’re hard and stiff, and so is he. He eases himself into the water, wincing at the heat. When he’s lying in a cold bath, he gets out. The lower half of his body is stained indigo. The 501s hang from his hips.
7
At university he opens an account in a bookshop and another one at Austin Reed’s, gentlemen’s outfitters. The first things he buys with his cards are a book about the cultural revolution and a long green cashmere scarf. He twists the scarf twice round his neck, the fringed ends trailing like dangling vines. His hair is long and catches in the scarf; at night he picks out teasels of bright-green cashmere from the curls at the back of his neck, like decadent angel down.