Imagined Slights Read online

  IMAGINED SLIGHTS

  James Lovegrove

  For P.C.

  First published 2002, first published as an ebook 2011

  ebook from Solaris, an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX1 0ES, UK

  www.solarisbooks.com

  ISBN (.epub): 978-1-84997-196-6

  ISBN (.mobi): 978-1-84997-197-3

  Copyright © James Lovegrove 2002

  The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from thenBritish Library.

  Designed and typeset by Rebellion Publishing

  Contents

  The Landlady's Dog

  Wings

  Satisfaction Guaranteed

  BritworldTM

  The House of Lazarus

  The Driftling

  Dead Letters

  A Taste of Heaven

  Nana

  The Gift

  The Unmentionable

  Thanatophile Seeks Similar

  Rosemary for Remembrance

  The Landlady's Dog

  "What do you believe in?" she asked.

  "I believe in love," I replied, hopefully.

  She rewarded me with the sweetest, most forgiving smile on Planet Earth. A smile saints would have died martyrs for. A smile to make the angels weep over their harps.

  "No, but what do you believe in?"

  "I don't know," I said, after some thought. "Do you mean God?"

  If she meant God, we were certainly parked in the right place. The windscreen framed a view that would have persuaded a hardened atheist to reconsider the options. The sinking sun, determined not to go down without a fight, was throwing out beacons and distress flares in every direction. The sea was a vast ruby and the brisk October wind made its million facets scintillate. Along the line of the horizon a liner slid with the flat and stately grace of a tin duck in a fairground shooting gallery. On the grass nearby two seagulls were squabbling over the corpse of a baby rabbit. It was one of those scenes of grandeur and bathos that only God can pull off with such aplomb (but then He does have an unlimited budget).

  "No," she said. "I mean, yes. Yes, that sort of thing, but not that. That doesn't count. No, what I'm trying to say is, what is your guiding principle?"

  "My guiding principle," I echoed. I had no idea where this conversation was going but I dared to hope it was heading in the direction I wanted it to. I dared to hope that Julia knew why I had been a tongue-tied geek all evening and why I had "suddenly decided" to drive us up here rather than to the cinema as we had planned and why I was so nervous that I had slammed on the accelerator instead of the brake as we drew up to the clifftop, nearly sending my clapped-out old Ford Fiesta hurtling over the edge, and us with it. I dared to hope that her X-ray vision had penetrated my jacket pocket and found the small box nestling there, and had pierced through its inner layers of tissue paper and velvet to find the glittering prize within. I dared to hope that I wouldn't have to go through with the whole heart-stopping procedure but that she would any moment now simply say Yes or I will or I do and bring the agony to an end.

  The trouble with Julia was that there was just no telling.

  "My guiding principle," I reiterated, wondering if I could twist this around to suit what I had to say, and deciding I couldn't. "Help old ladies across the road, be nice to dumb animals and always wash behind my ears." I shrugged. "That's me, the product of a middle-class upbringing."

  Again that smile.

  "Will you...?" I said, then stopped. So close, so damn close, and then someone thrust an iron bar down my throat.

  "Will I?"

  "Explain." There would be another chance, I was certain.

  "Explain?"

  "What the hell you're getting at."

  "What I'm getting at" - and she turned to face the sunset and her skin suddenly glowed mellow red - "is that I like you, Philip. A lot. You're funny and charming and thoughtful and considerate and good-looking and you haven't got too much money and you're not a rampant egomaniac and we have a laugh together and we're friends and..."

  For a sentence with so many ands in it, it carried an awful lot of but. I grinned anyway, slightly desperately, and said, "I never knew that not having too much money was one of my good points."

  "Definitely. Rich men are wankers."

  "Yes, but they can afford to be."

  "I'm glad we didn't go to the film," she said. "I'm glad we came up here instead. I've been meaning to say this for a while but I haven't had the opportunity. I value the time we've had together."

  "Hang on, haven't you missed something out?" I said, taking a firm grip on the steering wheel.

  "What?"

  "Between 'I haven't had the opportunity' and 'I value the time we've had together'."

  "I've been doing a lot of thinking lately."

  "You want to watch out for that. That's dangerous, that is."

  Rightly, she ignored me. "There's no one else. I want to make that clear. This is all me, all my idea."

  "Well, please don't keep me in suspense any longer, Julia."

  "I'm trying to be gentle."

  "Gentle?" I could hold back the tears but I couldn't keep the damning, unmanning sob out of my voice. "Gentle? About as gentle as a fucking crowbar!"

  "Philip!"

  "What about me? What about me?" I swear I felt the steering wheel begin to creak and bend in my hands.

  "OK, I'll tell you about you. You asked me. I'll tell you. You're not a real person, Philip. You're a collection of jokes and mannerisms and one-liners, and that's all very well and fine as it goes, but there's nothing more. There's nothing inside you. You're a shell. You're hollow. There's nothing that drives you or animates you or inspires you or motivates you. You're the sum total of other people's impressions of you." She ran a hand down the side of her face. "I'm sorry. I never intended to say any of this."

  "Perhaps it's just as well you did." After all, it had all the hallmarks of a deeply considered, well-rehearsed speech; it would have been a shame to let it go to waste.

  "Take me home, please."

  I started the car and thought seriously about shifting into first instead of reverse and doing deliberately what I'd almost done accidentally before, propelling us through the flimsy fence and over the edge to plummet in a hail of broken chalk and earn us a noun-rich headline epitaph: Young Couple In Love Pact Car Death Plunge Terror.

  But I didn't. And as we drove down the narrow, winding road, Julia staring out of the passenger-side window at the lees of the day, I found myself thanking God that I'd had the foresight not the throw away the receipt for the engagement ring.

  Of course I was embarrassed and humiliated and hurt and shocked and frustrated and angry and indignant and staggered and uncomprehending and incredulous and dazed and riddled with self-doubt and all the other things a man is supposed to be when a girl gives him the elbow. Of course I was. But I was also strangely, furtively relieved. As if I had never really intended to go through with it. As if I had chosen Julia to propose to because she was the best candidate for the job, not the woman I wanted to spent the rest of my life with but the woman I thought least likely to walk out over disagreements about pay and salary and hours. Already I was planning how I would pop down to the jeweller's shop tomorrow and hand back the ring and say something self-effacing and humorous like, "Right idea, wro
ng woman", and accept a credit note in lieu of a refund even if I had no idea what the hell I was going to spend it on at that tawdry junk-merchant's.

  Outside her house she leaned across the handbrake and brushed her lips against my cheek.

  "Just tell me there's no chance," I said, not looking at her.

  "There's no chance."

  "But say it as if you mean it."

  "There's no chance. I'm sorry. I'd like to think we could still, you know, see each other from time to time. I'd hate to think this was it."

  "That's up to you."

  "We could still go to the cinema together."

  "I hear they're showing The Untouchables."

  She drew back. "Is that supposed to be a joke?"

  "How would I know?"

  She opened the door. "I'll call you soon. I promise."

  "Great. I'll sit at home waiting. I won't eat and I won't sleep."

  She slid out. "Goodnight, Philip."

  "Yeah. 'Night."

  It was just dark as I let myself in through the front door of the boarding house. The hallway was hung with gloom, and the mutter of televisions and radios and pianissimo strains of music drifted down the stairwell. Mercifully the door to Mrs Konwicki's flat was closed, and I tiptoed past. I had one foot on the first riser of the first flight of stairs when her dog Lech started barking. He had a deep voice and punished the air with it. I scampered to the top of the flight, and then the devil took me and I leaned down and, putting on a queer, strangulated voice, shouted, "Shut that fucking rabid syphilitic fleabag the fuck up!" Then I fled further upstairs.

  Mrs Konwicki's door opened. The hall light flicked on and she yelled up after my fleeing footsteps, "Who's that?"

  Second floor, third floor...

  "I know who that is! Don't think I don't recognise your voice because I do."

  Fourth, fifth...

  "I know who you are!"

  I reached the door to my flat just as Mr Fleming, who lived on the second floor, came out to bawl at everyone to be quiet, shouting and running around like that, some people worked for a living, didn't you know? Someone else yelled at him to keep it down, and then Mrs Konwicki informed them both that this was a private argument between her and that idiot up there - and she knew who it was - so if they didn't mind, they could stop sticking their noses where they didn't belong.

  Soon there were tenants out on every landing, all protesting their right to peace and quiet at the tops of their voices. The dog syncopated the whole cacophony with loud unabated rowfs.

  I slipped into my flat, quietly, childishly gratified.

  The next morning there was a knock at the door. I staggered blinking away from the word processor, hitting Save as I went. It was Mrs Konwicki. Lech squatted at her heels, peering up at me with a frank, unintelligible expression. He was black and bony-big and lumpish, of no discernible pedigree, a knot of sinew bound up tightly in the shape of a dog. Looking at him I felt that if I patted his head, I had an equal chance of gaining a friend or losing a hand.

  I smiled, and Mrs Konwicki smiled back at me, and I smiled back harder at her and thought, I'm in trouble, she's brought the dog, I'm in trouble.

  "May I come in?"

  "It's your house, Mrs K. You can do what you like." I stepped back and ushered her into my humble abode with a theatrical flourish.

  "May Lech come in too?"

  "If he likes."

  Lech liked. He pattered in after his mistress and made a quick sweep of the room, checking for strange scents, of which there were plenty, before settling down in one corner and busying his huge slow tongue in his crotch. I was reminded of a joke: why does a dog licks its balls? Because it can.

  I smiled harder than ever.

  "Coffee?"

  "You're very kind. As black and sweet as you can make it." She lowered herself into a chair.

  "Taste of the old country, eh, Mrs K?"

  "No coffee tastes like coffee from the old country."

  "Bit of a rumpus last night," I understated as I handed her a steaming cup of instant, which not only didn't taste like coffee from the old country but didn't taste like coffee from any country.

  She sipped, squinted and sneered. "That Mr Vowelbroke..."

  Mrs Konwicki's accent was normally so faint it would have taken an expert to trace its origins, but when it came to English names she seemed to suffer a mental relapse and would mangle them with rich guttural abandon. (Perhaps it was her revenge for all the "Conwikkies" that had been inflicted upon her.) Hence Mr Walbrook - who occupied the flat below mine - became Mr Vowelbroke.

  "What's he done now?"

  "What's he done? He started it, didn't he? Calling poor Lech those dreadful names."

  "Mr Walbrook?" Who was as quiet as a mouse, not to mention as grey and timid and innocuous.

  "Well, who else could it be? It certainly wasn't you."

  "Absolutely not," I said quickly. "I'm very fond of Lech."

  I glanced at the dog and he looked back at me with eyes that, while doleful and wet with mucus, seemed to convey great depths of canine knowing.

  "I'll see to him," she muttered, and said no more about it.

  We chatted idly for a while, and I could see her gearing herself up to say what she had really climbed five flights of stairs to say. Finally she came out with it.

  "How is Jewelear?"

  "Julia's fine. Why do you ask?"

  "You went out with her last night. How was it?"

  "OK," I said. "Well, not OK. She wasn't feeling very well, so I dropped her off back at her house."

  "Oh," said Mrs Konwicki. A long, drawn-out, significant "Oh".

  "Exactly," I said.

  "You two make such a good couple. I don't say this about just anyone, you know, but you two seem to fit together like two halves of a whole. I have hopes that she might be the girl for you, I mean the girl for you. Of course I'm not saying you should get married. I'm not that old-fashioned. Nowadays people live together first, don't they? It would be nice to have her living here."

  By rights, the dramatic irony should have been twisting a dagger in my heart, but I was calm, I was cool, I was fine. I used to know someone who went around pubs betting people he could stub out a cigarette on the back of his hand. He had a patch of skin at the join between thumb and forefinger which had been left numb by an accident or an operation or something. He could make anything up to twenty quid a night this way, depending on the drunkenness and gullibility of the clientele. He had to give up eventually, though, when too much scar tissue built up and it looked as if he had spotted his hand with candle-wax.

  I had a numb patch in the shape of Julia and I could have stubbed cigarettes out on it all day long and never felt a thing.

  "I don't think I'm quite ready," I told her.

  "No one ever is, Feelhip. I know I wasn't. I hadn't even kissed Hubert before he proposed to me. I had barely looked at him. I didn't know his name. He came up to me at a village dance and said, 'Will you marry me?' and when I said no he said, 'How about a dance then?' How could I refuse? And at the end of the dance, as we tried to disentangle our hands but somehow couldn't, he asked me again and I said yes."

  If there is a household god for would-be-weds, there to ensure that embryonic proposals are not aborted, I wondered what the hell I'd done to offend the bastard.

  "That's lovely," I said.

  "Lovely? I suppose so."

  "I mean, you realised then and there that this was the man for you."

  "Oh no, I didn't realise. I had a feeling, that's all, a feeling that if I didn't say yes then, I would never have another chance. You only get second chances in fairy tales."

  "And slushy movies."

  "It turned out to be the right decision. Hubert took me away from Poland just before the Nazis moved in. He saw it coming. He was a very ... aware man, Hubert. Anyway," she said, slapping her hands on the armrests, "you must be busy and I can't sit here all day wasting your time. Lech!"

  I nodded. I h
ad three articles stacked like jumbo jets, circling over the deadline, gradually losing altitude. Although it's the perceived wisdom that you should throw yourself into your work when you have something to forget, I had nothing worth forgetting, so I had no more than the usual vague stirring of enthusiasm for my work. The articles would get written, but no sooner or quicker than expected.

  I showed Mrs Konwicki to the door and was brave enough to run my hands along Lech's back as he padded past me after her. I don't think he noticed.

  "If there's anything you want," she said, "anything that needs doing, you know of course that you can just ask me." It was obvious she was talking about something more than a blocked drain or a stuck window or the hot water not coming through. I thanked her, closed the door...

  ...and did a little soft-shoe shuffle across the carpet and punched the air a couple of times and wondered at the miracle of plausibility that had convinced Mrs Konwicki that it was wee, sleekit, cow'rin', tim'rous Mr Walbrook who had called her dog a fucking rabid syphilitic fleabag, and not me.

  Oh, I was so slippery, shit didn't stick.

  The day after that, Mr Walbrook fell ill. I heard his groans coming up through the floorboards, and when I didn't receive a coherent answer to my knocking and enquiring, I called an ambulance. Mrs Konwicki supplied the master key. The ambulancemen negotiated and manhandled Mr Walbrook down four flights of stairs strapped to a stretcher. Peritonitis was the pop diagnosis.

  It sent a frisson of excitement through the building. Any event that involved suffering or sexual subterfuge did. We were that kind of building, those kind of tenants.