Chapter 1: The End of the Beginning

Franklin stopped talking. He stopped for the best of reasons. He liked to talk because he always had so much to say. But then he stopped. I turned my head for a moment to look at the small alarm clock on his bedside table. Barely a twist of my neck. In that moment, he stopped talking.

I haven’t taken a drink since. Not that my body doesn’t crave alcohol. It reminds me all the time. I can smell whisky through glass, sense it through brick, and caress it from twenty feet away. But now, when my skin shrinks around me as though it might split, I turn away and think about my last day with Franklin.

Have you ever wanted to run from yourself? Have you ever woken in the night and wondered why you’re not dead yet? If you can look in the mirror and say no to both of these, and that you have no fears for the future, then I want to hear your story. I’ll rest here, nestled quietly, and listen and marvel. Because I had to learn the hard way.

You might think a near-photographic memory is a faculty to be envied, a key to success in any number of pursuits from science to gambling. But what if much you remember is beyond your comprehension? And what if that you can make sense of batters you like a persistent, discordant echo? You’d want release from that. Franklin coaxed me into letting my memories flow. But more than that, he enabled me to survive them.

I am Archie Watts, although Franklin always used my unabbreviated forename. Coming from anyone else that would have been unacceptable, but from Franklin it was almost musical. He said, “Your mother named you Archibald, not Archie. She wouldn’t like it to be shortened.”

I didn’t really know my mother, so his insight, whether spurious or factual, was precious to me. She died when I was three. Franklin was my age or a little younger, so he couldn’t have known her either. But when he spoke, it felt like he did know her – and he always used the present tense as if it were possible my mom could return.

I was working as a maintenance man in the south London borough of Hardwich – a name, pronounced hard-itch, which is both depressing and appropriate. The job was one for which I lacked aptitude and training, but I was willing to work for the minimum wage rate and was as conscientious as my addiction spared me to be.

The landlord, John Earl, owned two residential buildings. I had to service both, a total of one hundred and sixty-four flats. The tenants were charged exploitative rents for damp, draughty rooms, separated by partition walls with the sound-proof quality of limp cardboard.

In my first week, I made an appeal on behalf of a tenant whose flat urgently required repair. Earl laughed and said, “You’re the Super. Fucking sort it, man.” But he knew he’d given me no budget for the work.

John Earl – a south London baby-boomer – was a walking mountain of a man, topped with a pad of wiry, blond hair, which was flecked with white. He called me “Super” in a way that conveyed that he didn’t think I was super in any sense of the word. Earl’s use of Americanisms was something I slid into quickly. Perhaps my TV-loaded adolescence made it natural for me, too. Flats were apartments, storeys were floors, sometimes his assistants were vice-presidents, and the caretaker was the superintendent. But for some reason, I struggled to think of the lift as an elevator.

I came to understand I had to be careful around Earl because of his reputation for violence, and his four assistants whom he variously referred to as his board of directors, problem solvers and private bailiff service.

It was a February when I was recruited by J.M. Earl Property Letting Ltd, my predecessor having been fired in the run-up to Christmas, prior to a sudden purging of tenants. I learned later that Earl’s tenants could tell when the heavies were about to be sent in, because the maintenance man would get sacked first, presumably to avoid an unnecessary witness.

These sackings and the tenant purging occurred with the cycle in the letting market. Whenever Earl accumulated a new bunch of prospective tenants prepared to pay significantly more than the occupants, he sent in his “private bailiff service”.

Through talking to Mrs Zhang in Earl-Land Mansions, I came to understand that about eighteen months was the usual interval between purges. That February, as an impoverished thirty-four-year-old alcoholic who hadn’t achieved anything with a private boarding school education, even if I had been forewarned about Earl the prospect of eighteen months employment would still have felt like stability to me. But I hadn’t anticipated Franklin turning up.


Chapter 2: View from the Eighth Floor.

The realities of working for John Earl first became apparent near the end of my second week as “Super”. Yes ... Thursday, the twenty-sixth of February. Locating dates is unusual for me, particularly from that period. But that one is easy – it was the first time I was moved to scrawl an entry in that year’s diary.

I can’t be alone in remembering that day. The previous night, it had snowed so heavily that small airports were snowbound; returning, re-routed air travellers had to slog back to wherever they’d parked their cars. As for me – I’d passed out before the snow fell.

When I woke, I panicked thinking I’d overslept again. It was still early, probably barely five o’clock. But I didn’t know that as I set off, struggling to pedal my bicycle a mile from home to work without sliding into the paths of oncoming traffic.

How I made it to my “office” on the ground floor of Earl Towers is still a blur of flickering headlights, and a hammering in my head. One mercy was an almost superhuman insensitivity to the cold. I had my own anti-freeze.

I guess it was around five-thirty when I stumbled, pushing the front wheel of my borrowed bicycle against the door bearing a plate with the lettering: RM G3 BUILDING SUPERINTENDENT.

The cluttered room was at the rear of the ground floor. It was barely ten feet square, and had a single, north-facing window comprising of four wavy-glass panels. One of the two lower panels was broken, and covered with plywood. As the morning progressed, muted daylight probed the room through an inverted L of wavy glass. But at that time, the room was still in darkness until I switched on the fluorescent-light. Once the over-sized tube flickered into life, it flooded the room with so much light I had to close my eyes to stop myself screaming in pain.

I’d forgotten to bring my sunglasses. I had learned from day one that room G3 and sunglasses went together like scotch and American ginger ale. The latter made the former so much easier to swallow. Thinking back now, I must have cut a sinister figure sitting slumped day after day in that whited-out room, wearing sunglasses. Shades – isn’t that what they call them in America? So much cooler than sunglasses. Yes, men in black suits in shades. That was me, but without the black suit. A G-man hiding inside an alien pod from Planet Earl. Only, why I forgot my shades that morning, I can’t say. As a drunk, they had become almost part of me, a way of filtering the day until my stupor succumbed to sobriety.

When the pain eased, and after I’d wedged my bicycle behind the right-most of three dazzling, grey filing cabinets, I sat heavily down on the broken swivel chair, next to the half-size snooker table that pretended to be a desk.

With one elbow resting awkwardly on the skirt of the table to prop up my head, I leaned and picked up the telephone receiver, then pressed the MESSAGE PLAY button. There was one message. It was a woman’s voice, with a foreign accent, uttering sentences that defeated comprehension; all I could make out was URGENT, WATER, CEILING and EIGHT-ONE-EIGHT.

I checked the residents’ list, which was pinned to the board on the wall behind my chair. Apartment eight-one-eight: Mr and Mrs Benjamin Benton. I registered that the Bentons had the distinction of being the only people on the top floor whose names hadn’t been scribbled over. The remaining seventeen apartments had apparently been vacated.

It sounded like a plumbing problem, so I didn’t bother to return the call for an update. In truth, I couldn’t face the prospect of an agitated tenant shouting into my ear. Much better just to turn up as a heroic apparition.

I took my canvas bag of tools from the bottom drawer of the centre filing cabinet and headed for the stairs. I knew the lift’s emergency button didn’t work, and even in my delicate condition was not prepared to take the risk of becoming a maintenance man trapped, ignominiously. Several minutes later, that bag of tools felt like an anchor.


***
That was my first trip to the top of Earl Towers. The building’s name was misleading because there was one tower, and no land adjacent for future construction. But “misleading” – I had started to think – should have been Earl’s middle name: John Misleading Earl. Later, I came to imagine even more fitting candidates for that M.

The staircase rose adjacent to the lift shaft at the southern end of the building. On each of the eight floors above the non-residential ground floor, nine apartments had front doors opening onto a straight external walkway along the east face of the building and the same number of apartments lined a walkway on the west face of the building. Back-to-back in this way, half the small apartments had direct sunlight in the morning and half in the afternoon. Apartment eight-one-eight was at the far end, on the east side of the top floor.

As I walked in the winter morning darkness along that puddled walkway, with snow dressing the top of the rust-mottled railing, I absorbed the view – or more accurately, I sensed the view. It was perhaps the first moment since taking the job that it really sunk in where I was and what I was doing. Until then it had been a sort of dream. Perhaps it was my acrophobia or the cold wind, but, by the time I reached the end of the walkway, tears had welled.

I can’t remember pressing the door buzzer, but when I turned away from the northerly view onto the black oval of an athletics’ track, and beyond that the white and red car lights streaming westwards on the Hardich Road – seeming more like a river than the Thames flowing the other way a quarter-mile farther north – I was confronted by a pair of sad grey eyes. They peered up from a woman’s wrinkled face, with a stare that almost propelled me backwards.

“Thank Gott. Come in, mister man. Quick! Quick!”

The woman turned; her awkward, shuffling steps squeaked against the bare floor. I followed reluctantly. I recall the front of my scuffed toe-cap boots striding forward, dragging me along. The hall was dark and as miserable as outside. Mrs Benton had had the presence of mind to turn off the lights and electrical storage heaters.

“In here, mister man.”

I turned to the right, following the voice, and found myself in the bedroom. The smell of damp, already apparent in the hall, was here overpowering. I could hear the sound of water splattering against metal. Spheres of candlelight in the two far corners of the room sucked my vision away from the source of percussion. Suddenly I felt something brush past my left arm. If my reactions had been faster, I would have jumped out of the way. A moment later a torch beam probed the room from the doorway.

“I got this torch, mister man. Look! Look up there ... Look down here ... Look on my bed ... Look ... Look ...”

The cone of light swung around the room as Mrs Benton moved the torch’s beam from surface to surface, giving me no chance to focus.

“Please ...,” I said blinking, and easing the plastic torch from her frail grip.

The ceiling and upper walls were hosts to a variety of spores and moulds – varying from massive black smudges to arced ridges of fawn fungi, protruding like the edges of stacked saucers. In the centre of the double-bed was a large saucepan into which water dripped from the stained ceiling. More saucepans sat close by, waiting their turn. The frayed red candlewick bedspread was soaked, the dampness stealing its brightness and flattening the fabric texture.

“I have been empty making these pans for more than six hour, mister man. I am exhausted. It is too much – I can’t go on. I am too old. You hear me? Eighty-five-year-old. You must make it to stop.”

The strain in her voice filtered through the semi-inebriated numbness to the residue of the conscientious me; the only useful bit of me that had survived its own prolonged deluge, albeit a whisky one. “Of course, Mrs Benton. I’ll take care of it.”

The words had left me, seemingly of their own volition and with barely a slur. It was “Educated Archie” – not “Inebriated Archie” – making a brief appearance. I remember staring at that dripping ceiling, playing the torch’s light back and forth, as the grip of utter helplessness closed in on me so I could barely breathe.

“Goot. Goot boy ... Goot boy .... Goot boy ..... Goot boy ...... Goot boy.”

The words faded as Mrs Benton moved away to another part of her dank home.

I placed my bag on the end of the bed and shone the torch inside, desperately trying to clear my thoughts. By the time she returned, I was holding a tube of silicone bathroom-sealant. Perhaps, because of the darkness, I exuded an aura of competence. More likely, Mrs Benton was desperate to believe. That white tube would heal her ceiling, and make everything right in the world, or at least that miserable chunk of it trapped inside apartment eight-one-eight.

“Here – take this, Atchie,” she said, pushing a glass of milk at me. I couldn’t remember telling her my name, but she was saying it again and again as if she was sneezing.

“You need to keep up your strength, Atchie. Drink it all up.”

“How long have you lived here?” I asked, trying to stifle an impulse to retch.

“Forty-three year, Atchie. Me and my husband, Benjamin – Gott rest his soul. We were with the first to come, I tell you. The building was spanking new then. This was our luxury penthouse apartment. Our home! Until five-year ago, we used to thank Gott every morning when the sun shone through that very window. ‘We live another day,’ Benjamin would say. ‘We live another day.’ Do you hear me, Atchie? ‘We live another day’.”

By then, I’d grabbed a saucepan and was vomiting into it.

“Aaa ... You are not well, Atchie. It is this place. But it was not always this way. Only since the building was taken over by that big man. I tell you, he is the Devil himself.”

“Mr ... Earl,” I spluttered, wiping my mouth on my sleeve.

“Don’t say that name to me, Atchie. I spit on him. It is because of him that my Benjamin is gone. His spirit was broken, Gott bless him ... Then his heart.”

“I-I don’t—”

“You are a goot boy, Atchie. I tell you now. Be careful. Or you end like Peter. He was the engineer in this building until four year ago. He was a goot boy, too. German like us. He went over that very railing outside my front door.

“Mrs Desai – she was living next door then – then I had neighbours – she knocked on my front door. It was a Thursday, just like is today. ‘Come, Mrs Benton. Come quickly,’ she said. ‘There are police here.’

“We looked down from the walkway – out there. There was a white sheet on the ground with ret stains. Blue shapes move this way, that way ... police helmets ... flashing lights ... That was the last of Peter. I tell you, Atchie – be careful. It is the Nazis all over again. I never thought ... Not again.”

There was silence for a moment. I struggled to make sense of what she was saying. I could barely hold onto the reality of the moment, let alone the implications of someone falling over a railing years before. I think I was swaying when she shouted.

“Atchie – the saucepan! It’s flowing over. Quick – help change it.”

I don’t recall how long I stood wobbling on the bed, hands raised to the ceiling, blindly smearing sealant like a fool standing under a shedding oak tree with a pan and brush on an autumn day. But it was long enough that a little daylight started to take the edge off the darkness; the torch’s battery had already expired on that bed like Benjamin.

The source of the water ingress moved around the ceiling, and divided into smaller drips. With help from Mrs Benton, I positioned saucepans around my parted, socked feet. The pans tilted against my ankles due to my weight compressing crater-like into the mattress, and so could hold little before overflowing. But encouraged by Mrs Benton, on I went, tube after tube, my arms numb from the pain of prolonged elevation, and my head spinning.

“Goot Atchie ... Goot Atchie ... It’s stopping! It’s stopping! More – more.”

She was right. My pathetic exertions seemed to be slowing the drips. I started to laugh, and she joined in. We were beating it; whatever it was for her – whatever it was for me.

“Put on another tube, Atchie ... More ... Goot boy.” Then she started singing. Not words. Just a sort of, “Dooh, dooh, dooh – da-dooh – da-dooh ...”

And I was working faster, exhilarated by the unfamiliar possibility of victory. A few more smears, and a few more for luck.

When I stopped laughing, I registered she’d stopped singing. I looked down and saw she’d moved across the room, away from the door. She was sandwiched between the light of a near-burnt-down candle and the cool daylight struggling through the window. I probably still had a stupid grin on my face as I absorbed for the first time her appearance. That morning, she’d transmuted from haunting eyes at the front door, through semi-disembodied voice in the darkness, to clinging, laughing companion in a sinking lifeboat. But now she was almost visible, and I was almost sober.

Her stooped figure was bulked out by a brown overcoat and a red-and-white football scarf, both of which presumably once belonged to Benjamin. Her legs were hidden inside oversized black gum boots. Thick, flattened, grey hair, parted in the middle, framed her lined face, and ended in a ragged cut clear of her shoulders. Folds of skin hung under her wide-open eyes, and under her cheeks. Downy wisps of fine hair lined her top lip and softened her trembling chin. Her pallor was a greyish-yellow in that light. One of her hands was clutching the flaking window sill; the other, with gnarled joints, was pointing. She seemed to be trying to speak. But the voice I heard wasn’t hers.


Chapter 3: Bargain Basement

“Super! I’ve been looking for you. What you doin’ up ’ere in the dark? Why ain’t the bleedin’ light on?”

I doubt my grin had caught up with the fear I’d detected in the eyes of Mrs Benton as I turned, rocking on the mattress, to face the doorway. “Best let the electrics dry out, Mr Earl. The melting snow’s been leaking in,” I said, feeling proud of my insight.

I couldn’t see the reaction on my boss’s face due to the shadows, and small amount of daylight. I recall anticipating an acknowledgment of the bang-up job I’d been doing, or thought I’d been doing. Several seconds passed before Earl spoke again, giving me just enough time to start remembering the things Mrs Benton had talked about – but they didn’t come to me as her words, more as a feeling.

“Got an urgent job for you, Super. Two big skips are due any time now. I want you to go down – wait for them, then clear out the basement. You hear? Get all that shite in there the fuck out.”

“Everything, Mr Earl?”

“You deaf? ... I don’t want nothing kept. I need the space for a special delivery coming this afternoon.”

Until then, Earl had been civil to me. I felt somehow I’d done something wrong. Not a new feeling in my life, but disheartening to feel again, after what had been a couple of hope-filled weeks. Earl had taken me on when no one else would give me a chance. I think a part of me had actually loved him for that.

I stepped down from the bed, disoriented and apprehensive. Two saucepans shifted, tipping their contents onto the already soaked bedding. I turned to Mrs Benton, trying to mutter an apology as I picked up my tool bag. “Sorry, Mrs Benton. I’ll finish off lat—”

“You won’t have time. Not today. Not after all that shifting. Take the rest of the day off. Okay, Super?”

I tried to protest, but Earl gripped my shoulder in a way that was both friendly and intimidating. I squeezed past him; his bulk nearly filled the doorway. I turned as I started down the hall. “Don’t you want help unloading the special delivery, Mr Earl?”

“All took care of. You make sure you go home. Okay, Super?”

“Yes, sir. Thank you,” I said, sideways-stepping out onto the walkway with an unfamiliar sensation of having left something behind that mattered.

As I approached the other end of the walkway, it dawned on me that Earl wasn’t following. That unsettled me; I imagined Earl examining my handiwork. And the more sober I became, the less sure I felt I’d done anything except make a sticky mess. I feared him shouting after me, something like, “Get back here, you stupid idiot, and clear this shite up.”

But I reached the lift in silence. My knees started to weaken; I couldn’t face the stairs and the long walk down, so pressed the button. The lift was already on the eighth floor, having brought Earl up, so the door opened immediately. Relieved, I stepped inside and cried for the second time that morning.

The lift had a cracked mirror screwed to a graffiti-sprayed wall. Reflections have a way of creeping up on drunks. The numb staring at the nothing, or is it the other way round? I was taken aback by my appearance.

I hadn’t shaved in three or four days, but until that moment hadn’t realized. Black smudges of dirt asserted themselves against my coffee skin, concealing acne eruptions. Swellings under my brown eyes betrayed my fitful sleeping. The first sign of greyness by my left temple stood out against my uncombed frizz of black hair. But it was the sight of me crying that shocked me into stopping. I kicked the wall under the mirror and turned away, reaching into the deep back pocket of my blue overalls for the flask-bottle of whisky. The bottle was half-full, but I drained it before the lift reached the ground floor.

I needed to get another bottle before going down to the basement, and hoped there would be one in my filing cabinet. My whisky filing system was impressive, at least by my standards of functioning. The bottom drawer of the left-most cabinet was for empties, and the drawer above was for new and part-filled bottles. I slid open the bottom drawer to the accompanying sound of chinking glass.

There must have been around eighteen empty bottles in there, just over one for each day of my employment. Hiding the empties is where the drunk gets caught out, not in concealing fresh supplies. Disposing of the empty bottle can always wait one more day whereas getting a full one can’t wait. Before you know it, you’ve cornered the glass market.

If only you could get money back on empty whisky bottles. Better still, why isn’t there a recycling system for drunks? You just post yourself through a slot and wait to be chopped up and reassembled; all the good parts of different drunks banged into one new creature with a working liver.

I should say, in pathetic mitigation, that the empty bottles were mostly the flask-bottle type. Even I couldn’t routinely get through a full-size bottle of whisky every day at work. No, that would have taken the serious dedication I reserved for the night. My preference for the flask-bottle was in part governed by its portability. There was another reason for favouring the smaller bottle size. I could steal them without getting caught.

That day, like most days, there were no part-full or full bottles in the second drawer. I would have to go out, to a shop or off-licence nearby, which would mean paying to avoid the risk of fouling up in my own manor.

As I approached the wire-reinforced glass door to Earl Towers, it was swinging inwards, propelled by the forearm of a large, dumpling-faced, overweight man with a cigarette drooping from his mouth.

His overalls were filthier than my own, I gauged, barely focussing. In fact, I remember thinking that maybe I didn’t look so bad after all; everything is relative. How my father used to hate me saying that. “Everything is relative, Dad,” I would say in an attempt to portray one or other failure of mine as being less shameful than he so clearly judged it to be.

What the old colonel would have thought at that moment haunts me now. So lost was I to imagine my overalls could be in any sense better, less urinated on, less vomited on, less grubby than any other pair in existence. And even if there were truth in this, to think there could be a morsel of superiority being mined by me from that emptiness of ambition would have broken my father’s heart again.

“Can ya sign for this, mate?” asked the man in a growl between coughs. I must have been slow to answer, because he grasped my shoulder, and pulled me to the door. He pointed at the two idling lorries parked with nearside wheels on the kerb. The second driver, even stouter than the man whose maw held me, was crushing a cigarette stub on the pavement with his sole while lighting a new one. It seemed like he was doing a kind of momentary fat-git dance routine.

I scrawled my initials using the broken ballpoint pen from my top pocket. Then the first driver said, “Where?”

The last slug of whisky had started to kick in. I think I started to smile. I twisted round so I could gesture behind me, towards the rear of the building. Thinking back now to his reaction, my reply must have been slurred. “Er ... ah ... er ... Can you reversh down the side – that shide – the back really – and leaf them by the green double-doors?”

“Okay, pisshead.”

He released me and opened the door to leave.

“Gwateful, old boy,” I said – a favourite phrase of the old Colonel.

“Go fuck yourself,” or something like that were the skip driver’s departing words.

I think I stood waving, as if saying farewell to relatives, while the drivers talked by the kerb. The first driver pointed in my direction. Maybe that was when I waved. Waving was definitely involved. Maybe he was pointing at the building’s service road, not me, now I think about it. But I definitely waved. I know, because the next words I heard were, “Who are you waving at, Super?”

“Ugh ... No one, sir ... Mean ... er ... Th-the skips have come, Mr Earl,” I said with my head clearing as quickly as if it had just been slapped. I held up the copy of the delivery note, hoping that if my voice wasn’t working, my meaning would still be clear.

Earl moved closer, leaned forward, stared into my eyes and sniffed deeply. “You all right, Super?”

“I’m fine, sir ... Really.”

“Good – then go fill those skips, and fuck off home while you can still stand.”
And then he was gone, leaving me to replay the scene over and over, trying to make it somehow okay, a normal boss to employee encounter with no undertow back to the unemployment queue.

***
After the lorries had deposited the steel skips, and departed northwards in the direction of the Hardich Road, I walked along the slush-covered service road on the north side of Earl Towers. It was still cold, but I was sweating.

Partially obstructed now, by the two skips, was the external stairwell that led down to the basement. The basement’s double-door probably had been broken open many times; a jagged hole showed where the handle and lock had once been. Replacing the handle and lock were on my “to do” list, somewhere near the bottom.

The right-hand-side door was ajar, and moving to and fro with the swirling breeze. It was the first time I’d gone to the basement with a purpose other than to just establish where it was and what Earl had meant about the doors needing repair.

Two thoughts occurred as I walked down the concrete steps: Shit – I should have fixed the lock. Mr Earl has a delivery coming this afternoon; he’ll want it to be safe. And why is the light on?

I reached for the absent flask-bottle, thinking it might make a protective weapon, but probably also hoping it contained drips of amber courage. With my hands shaped as fists and my arms stiff against my sides, I used the toe of my boot to hook the door open.

I was confronted by a long room with racks of steel shelves at one end, and with a cluttered area of concrete floor at the other. Two large fluorescent tubes, each like the one in my tiny office, lit up the large space and cast shadows under the objects protruding from the shelves. I was relieved to not find anyone lurking behind the door; I wouldn’t have been much of an adversary in my condition.

The nearest rack of shelves was about ten feet in front of me. I surveyed the objects on the bottom shelf, not believing they all could have no value: plastic water tank with crack, large clear plastic bag of assorted corroded pipe fittings, pile of fluorescent-light housings, a bald car tyre.

I raised my gaze to the next shelf: stacks of yellowed, foam-polystyrene ceiling tiles, four empty cardboard reels threaded side-by-side on a broom stick, a tea-crate from which protruded a mound of chipped crockery, five rolls of grey carpeting, and a pile of assorted signs for warning tenants of hazardous work in progress.

Then I looked up at the third shelf, which ran at about shoulder height: three large ice-cream tubs filled with rusted screws, bolts and washers, a pile of soft foam wedges that looked like they’d once belonged to a settee, a large television with a smashed screen, a shadow-sliced brownish face with a broad smile that exposed white teeth and was bracketed by large dimples ... And that was the moment I first saw the man I came to know as Franklin.

“This is out of bounds,” I said. What a strange turn of phrase; it had come seemingly from my private-school days when so many parts of the sprawling Irving Boys’ School were out of bounds at certain times of the year. “Are you a resident?” I continued, hoping he would say yes and I could let him tell me he’d got lost, or maybe was looking for the caretaker. Anything to give him and me an excuse to treat his presence as not in any way suspicious.

“Well... I am ‘ere, mmnnnn” he answered in a warm, non-threatening voice, and finishing with a high-pitched sigh, almost as if swallowing a pain.

“Er ... I mean, are you—?”

“You look like you need a drink.”

I coughed to clear my throat, and tried to find a more assertive, or at least alert, posture. “I have to clear all this shite out of here. You’ll have to leave.” Shite was Earl’s word, but now it was part of my vocabulary.

“There are a lot of things. It will be ’ard work. I can ’elp you, mmnnnn”

“Er ... I can’t pay you.”

“Allow me to keep a few of the things you are going to throw away.”

I considered the effort of carrying the objects from the shelves, and then looked towards the heap of debris that filled the far end of the basement. It seemed a lot of stuff to get into the two skips. If some of it was to go missing, then all to the good. I shrugged, “Okay. It’s junk anyway.”

“Where do you want to take it?” he asked.

“There are skips outside. Just been delivered as I ordered,” I said, embellishing the fact for my own pathetic need to seem more than I was.

“Why don’t you go and get a drink, while I make a start?”

I chewed at my finger nails. What a tempting suggestion. My skin and veins were thinking for me now.

He could read me, because as I plunged my hands from pocket to pocket with panic spreading over my face, he said, “I’ll lend you the money.”

I had become transparent. A down-an-out pretending to be a human being. “Er ... Thank you ... er ... sir.” Now this stranger was in charge of me, and I was back in my place as beggar. I scratched at the side of my face, and looked at the floor.

“Please don’t call me ‘sir’.”

“Er ...”

“If you guess my name, I’ll give you the money for the whisky, instead of lending it.”

I stared at his face, which was still framed by the shelves of junk. “Ali?”

He shook his head.

“Er ... Sidi?”

He shook his head again.

I suddenly had the thought that maybe he was related to Earl. My stomach started to heave, and my forehead pricked. “Er ... It’s impossible,” I gasped. But free whisky – free whisky without stealing it. I’d not had such a sublime offer in years.

“Very well. Instead, if you memorize all the things on these shelves, I will receive that as payment.”

“Ugh ... What?”

“Just the first three shelves, mmnnnn.”

“I don’t want to do that ... My mind ...”

“Make up a story as you look from object to object. Word association is the trick to remembering. Start with the first object on the bottom shelf.”

My breathing quickened; my lungs felt empty. With my memory, the lumps of junk were already buried in my mind, but that was a terrifying place to disturb. Yet, I had no choice other than to humour him if the free whisky was to be mine.

“A cracked tank,” I said.

“So? What image can you form?”

“Er ... An army tank – with a ... With a broken ... What is it? ... A broken track.”

“Good. Next object, mmnnnn.”

“Bag of old pipe fittings.”

“So? Start a story.”

“Er ... er ... A tank slips a track, and the commander opens a hatch to find a repair kit – but only finds a bag of pipe fittings.”

“Good. Keep the story going, item to item.”

“He needs a bright idea, and a light bulb comes on in his mind – that is the heap of light fittings.”

“Good.”

“But all the thinking makes him tired, and he scratches his head until his hair falls out. So th-that’s the bald tyre.”

“You’ve got the idea.”

“Er ... He feels tired, and has to lie down on a pile of foam-polystyrene tiles, which is so high he rolls off four times.”

“Yes.”

“Then, he decides he needs a cup of tea to wake himself up, but finds all the cups are broken – so he gets some carpeting to parcel them up, so he won’t cut himself. Then he put a warning sign on the outside of the parcel. After that, he starts to wonder if he’s gone nuts, and makes a bolt for the door because he wants to find the bathroom to wash his face.”

By this time, my thirst was backing away into its own corner. I continued my wild imaginings. “In the bathroom, he finds giant soap bars that cover him in foam, so he can’t see where he is going, and he stumbles head-first into a television set, smashing the screen and the news reader falls out of the set. That is you ... I suppose.”

“So, what is my name?”

“Er ... Fallen man? ... No, that can’t be it. Frankly – I don’t know.”

“That’s it – nearly, mmnnnn.”

“Frankie?”

“Franklin.”

“Oh ...”

“Take this, Archibald. I will start to empty the room while you get your whisky.” He was proffering a ten-pound note, his arm raised over the third shelf.

“I’m Archie,” I corrected him, not yet wondering how he knew my name; the ten-pound note was pulling at my intention.

As I came closer, he said, “But your mother called you Archibald. She wouldn’t like it to be abbreviated.”

Suddenly, I didn’t want the note or the whisky. But that unfamiliar feeling of satiation survived for only seconds. The note was in my hand, and I was outside walking in the direction of the nearest mini-supermarket.

When I got there, I found the shop was running promotions on some brands of spirits – presumably excess stock from Christmas and New Year. Whatever the reason, I could buy a full-size bottle of cheap blended whisky for nine pounds, leaving change for a pack of mints.

I found a dank alley, a block farther away from Earl Towers, and unscrewed the bottle. I didn’t make it back to work that day.


Chapter 4: Stock Taking

I awakened to a dog licking my face, and then peeing on my leg. It was dark. The jarring traffic noise from the ends of the alley told me it was rush hour.

The bottle was tilted on its side, so some whisky that I hadn’t drunk yet had spilt into the dirt. I couldn’t find the screw-cap, so I picked up the bottle by its neck with my thumb jammed into the opening. I used my other arm to screen the bottle from view as best I could. The colonel would have been proud.

I walked home as I didn’t dare return to collect my bicycle, and probably wouldn’t have had the strength to ride it anyway. I think it was around seven when I reached my one-room squat in the basement of a condemned building. Unlike the basement at Earl Towers, this one was irregular in shape, full of alcoves. Maybe it had been dug out in this way to avoid existing drainage and service pipes. Windows faced onto concrete-lined trenches that here and there had been excavated to permit daylight. But these windows were now boarded over, like those on the ground and the upper floor. Behind these plywood panels, my presence was unobtrusive; light from my candles, which could leak out through small holes I’d made, was not discernable at pavement level.

The property was so run-down, it defied standing – a characteristic I somehow took inspiration from. Stacks of wrinkled catalogues, listing pressure-relief valves, remained from a firm that had worked there.

I lit a candle and then slumped in the worn-out easy chair. Tears came for the third time that day. The fresh air during the walk had had some effect, and the events of the day dribbled into my spinning thoughts: the ceiling in Mrs Benton’s apartment; the look in her eyes; the sodden bedding; me standing on the mattress, rocking from side to side; Mr Earl shouting at me. “Get all that shite out ...”

What happened to the shite? The skips – the stranger ... Oh no! The shite – the shite. I didn’t want to think about the shite. Who was the stranger? I leaned forward, and shook my head.

Who was the stranger? ... Tank breaks down ... Driver looks in boot ... Finds bag of pipe fittings ... I pulled the imagery from my short-term memory, not as a torrent of needles, but mediated by a creative narrative that carried the precious message that these ... these were safe. On and on .... Tank driver covered in foam ... Falls on a television and breaks the screen ... News reader falls out ... Smiling face ... Dimples ... Frankie ... Franklin ... Franklin.

Why’d he give me the money? How did he know my name? He was going to help – help with the shite. Could he have done it? On his own – all the shite out of there – on his own ... mmnnnn ... mmnnnn ... That strange sigh. Yes – yes – yes – I would still have my job – if only. Please – please let it be.

I poured myself a shot, and picked up the diary I’d rescued from a refuse bag after Christmas. It had a picture of white kittens on the cover. I guessed it had been given to a dog lover. For the first time, I felt moved to write something in it: the list of junk items I’d memorised that morning ending with FRANKLIN.