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Jake Sladder, he called himself, watching those who asked to
see if they
got the joke. They never did. He kept himself out of trouble and
out of a
job so his real name didn't matter; he was one of the tramps you
see in the
shopping centre, one of the shapeless bearded filthy men
mummified in
layers of brown clothes, powerless men, frightening men, lonely
people with
snake-nest hair and eyes you mustn't meet.
To tell the truth, he was a poor tramp. You'd never see him with
a bottle
or a paper cup, and he dipped into bins to rescue a newspaper, or
some
abandoned envelope with a secret within. He had the necessities
of life; he
cadged food from pubs when they shut, was happy with his own
company, had a
shed in the scree of the old industrial estate. From the outside,
it was a
ramshackle affair, apparently a smaller form of the spirit of the
skeletal,
deserted warehouses and rusted shells of Nissen huts. You might
think it
miraculous that it kept the rain out, if you knew he lived there,
but no
more; a more curious observer might think it odd that it was free
of the
hieroglyph graffiti that grows like lichen on the concrete rubble
of the
estate. To tell the truth, it was a poor shed, not really in
keeping with
the surroundings at all. The unremarkable oddness of the outside
was just a
hint, a faint odour of what was stored within.
He loved that estate with a passion; no country squire, no king
had ever
taken more pleasure from their land. If you look on the map,
there's
nothing there; a few canals and tidal rivers, the sewage works to
the
south, a few big buildings still in official use, but mostly an
expanse of
white. Even if you walk across it, it's hard to judge how far
you've gone;
there are always big buildings on the horizon, always a clutter
of iron and
litter around you, cracked concrete with rough scrub poking
through. One
area looked much the same as another, details and scale might
change, but
the essence of the place was everywhere, a pattern beneath
perception that
repeated itself constantly.
On Sundays, if the weather had been good enough for the ground to
be dry,
he went out for a stroll, beachcombing. One of his unconcealed
secrets was
that he was an avid collector of cracks, discontinuities, broken
things.
These he categorised as carefully, as meticulously as a Victorian
botanist.
There were, he found, two main kingdoms, as clearly distinct as
animal and
vegetable. One he called Decay, and one Force. Both were
everywhere; the
cracks in the concrete and paving stones were Decay, formed
slowly in the
absence of care. Force was harsher, more unpleasant; it was the
shiny,
expensive cars that sat outside those buildings where people
worked. The
buildings were always dilapidated, often with broken windows
roughly
bricked up. There was a large road through the centre of the
estate,
bluntly breaking it apart, this, too, was Force.
Decay, he wrote, is a positive, ordered thing that replicates
itself. Here
are drawings of a broken concrete wall, near to the second canal,
taken
over five years. There is a small crack at first, but at the end
it has
grown many feet, splintering off, producing more small cracks. I
would
expect the process to continue. Force is arbitrary, apparent
order but a
product of so many rules and so many directions that it may as
well be
random. Force items don't continue for long, no matter what is
tried. It is
irrelevent, and irrelevence is always unsustainable. Failure and
obsolescence are just special cases of irrelevence.
Most of all, when collecting, he loved to find tapes. He couldn't
decide
what these were; they didn't fit into his scheme. He always
picked up the
shiny seaweed strands when he came across them, usually washed up
along the
shoreline that marked, with a sharp right-angle, the boundary
between the
pavement with all its wonderful cracks and the smooth, frozen
surface of
the road. He took them back to the shed, washed them, wound them
onto
spools. Always the same night, because he loved ritual, he played
them; he
had brought a certain skill with machines with him when he moved
onto the
estate, and had quickly found and repaired a cassette player.
Mostly, the tapes were music of all sorts. He had his favourites,
but liked
it most when the surface of the tape was scratched or folded; the
sound
came and went, crackled, was incomplete. The very best tapes he
listened to
twice and then burned. There was a compulsion in him to do this,
a
cancerous generosity that he recognised and was grateful for. He
had given
everything he loved away to the point of emptiness, and always he
found
things more precious to take their place. There was a pain to it,
which
enhanced the addiction, and it was sharper still when the gift
was just a
sacrifice. Sometimes he wondered whether there wasn't a household
god or
two hiding behind the piles of paper, who took his offerings and
guarded
him and the shed from inquiry. Perhaps it was they who'd brought
him here,
after he'd given away his carefully acquired life as proof of his
dedication. He didn't think about this, or himself. often.
Those were Sundays, the day that he worked. Otherwise, he
wandered around,
slipping easily into fantasies while walking the sewerage paths
and
landfill sites, imagining a time before man or a medieval town
long
abandoned because of the plague. He could feel the breaking-down
of the
estate returning the land to some mythical nature; on a sunny
day, he could
sit by the reeds and teasels at a marshy intersection of the
canals and
fall without effort into an animal state, prehistoric. In truth,
the marsh
was a gem of a place, with willows and wading birds and a
richness of
flowers.
Other times he thinks forward, to the days he's sure will come,
when London
is emptied by a new plague. Once he was paid to worry about this,
even to
mark out the maps where the danger lay, but at a point during the
long,
painful shedding of those times he found a realisation.
He remembers that moment, and the note he wrote: It's ridiculous
for us to
worry about the Earth, a planet born in fire out of the fragments
of
shattered stars, a planet which has produced life out of heat and
cold and
vacuum and radiation. What can we do to a place like this? And if
we do it,
why, things will carry on. We kill so many things to let
ourselves live,
that's the way we are and we can no more change that than we can
expect
clover to stop fixing nitrogen. If we ourselves perish, so what?
We can't
expect the rules we use to control nature to be somehow waived
for us.
One Sunday, he found a complete cassette, caked in mud and with a
hand-written label, just a serial number. One side was Mozart, a
beautiful
creation he'd once enjoyed playing and that brought him to tears
with
memories of the people he'd given away. The other side was a
radio talk, by
an American who, he realised, he had once met, at a conference.
It was a
passionate piece about the death of places, the homogenous slide
of
humanity over the planet and the dangers of such an unstable
system, like a
bridge built on single poles each having to be kept precisely in
balance.
To guard against this, the American said, we are building
intelligent
things to create a diverse environment, many different approaches
to one
end. At first, a life support machine, but finally a way to
incredible
richness for everyone. We will have overtaken Nature, he
finished.
During that night, he replayed the tape many times, trying to
decide what
it was saying. Towards dawn, the words started to collide with
themselves
and the ideas he not so much thought as observed forming. As the
factories
around started to work, the Monday dawn chorus of crushers,
lorries and
cars, he found a way of making sense of it all, a way forward.
Methodically, he spread the papers, his notes, sketches, around
the inside
of the shed. He had a small parafin burner, which he emptied onto
the
floor, and then placed the cassette player in the middle of the
mess. He
turned the tape over, and rewound to the start. As the great
music played,
he set light to a newspaper and threw it down, walking out of the
door and
shutting it behind him.
He watched for a while, making sure that the fire had caught.
Then he
turned and walked towards the road, back into the city. He walked
steadily
for hours, back into places he knew, reclaiming them. Finally, he
came to
the university hospital. He walked in.
The nurse at the desk nervously looked at him. "Can I help
you, sir?", she
said, glancing around to see if a porter was nearby.
"Does Dr Henderson work here?", he asked.
The nurse stared at him. She hadn't expected a tramp to talk like
that.
"Well?", he said.
"Y... yes, he does. He's not in A&E, er, casualty,
though. He works in
research. I don't think he can help you." She recovered.
"Why don't you
take a seat, and I'll get someone to come and have a look at
you."
"I'd rather speak to Dr Henderson, if you don't mind"
"I really don't think he's the right person..."
"Nurse, when I say I want to speak to Dr Henderson, then
he's the right
person. Now, will you get him for me? Please?"
Her composure completely gone, she could only gawp at him. Around
them, a
fascinated silence.
"Oh, for heaven's sake. Bleep Dr Henderson, or I'll come
back there and do
it myself"
"I... yes, sir. Who shall I say wants him?"
"Barker. Professor Jacob Barker."
Back on the estate, the firemen had finished with the shed.
Little
remained, but they had to go through the blackened, sticky mess.
Someone
had reported that a tramp had lived in the place, and clearly
someone had
started the fire, but there was no trace of a body. Another minor
mystery,
thought the policeman who wrote up the report, another bloody
waste of
time.
(c) rg
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