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VI

To cut things short, I used to work on the building sites. After we finished that factory, we moved to the other side of town and put up a warehouse and then we did some office buildings in the classical warehouse style. My overdraft became smaller despite the best efforts of Mr Fallow and his staff. I worked on sites as far away as Wolverhampton and Tipton, despite the language barrier.

The buildings were always the same. I mean, they had different functions – this one was a hospital, this one an office, this one a luxury hotel with many and varied facilities – but they all looked like warehouses.

‘That,’ Mr Link would say, surveying whatever we had just finished bundling together, ‘is what a building is meant to look like. Square, straight, flat on the top and no fancy business.’

Darren and I had decided that Mr Link genuinely believed this. Strange beliefs and superstitions were common on building sites. Spin believed that scaffolding formed matrices that could tune in to otherworldly broadcasts. Darren believed that if he dug far enough down, his trench would connect with the mines that ran under Dudley and he’d be able to tunnel under the off-licence and get all his drinks for free. Mr Link believed that all buildings should be cuboid and without decoration or, ideally, doors and windows. I believed that I was at the beginning of my life and things would turn out okay without me putting much effort into it.

‘Square and straight,’ Mr Link would say. The rest of us would look at each other and try to get away. ‘Nothing fancy. Gargoyles and curlicues and all of that are all well and good for cathedrals, but the modern building is regular. Solid. No weaknesses in the structure.’

This was clearly untrue. In high winds the warehouses we put up fell apart, great sheets of prefab spinning off into the night like a giant conjuror’s playing cards. The structures were riddled with weaknesses, apart from the foundations. Those were solid.

‘Some of them fall down,’ Darren said.

Mr Link gave him a poisonous look. ‘That,’ he said slowly, ‘is because there are weak spots. Windows! Doors! How can we make a solid structure when there are parts of it that open?’

‘It’s sort of fashionable to have doors and windows,’ said Darren.

Spin explained, by use of gestures, that it was traditional to have doors set into buildings so that people could enter and leave them.

‘That’s the thing,’ explained Mr Link. ‘If it was a decent building, they wouldn’t want to leave.’

Spin explained, by use of gestures, that he had thought of something else he could be doing. Darren and I went with him, leaving Mr Link looking at our latest construction – a theme pub on the main road between Stourbridge and Wolverley – and thinking how nice it would look without the windows spoiling the purity of the architectural line.

One morning, the building society sent me a letter including a monthly balance. There was a note of congratulation enclosed, signed by Mr Fallow. My account had become positive for several days. It had since become negative again, of course.

They charged me £15 for the congratulatory note.

The next month, there were more positive days. My account went from red to black, like an infected wound. I no longer needed to work on building sites to pay off my overdraft. I was able, instead, to look for a less well-paying graduate job.

I said a farewell to Mr Link and the gang on a Friday at the end of a bright and cold February. We went to the pub.

‘I knew you’d be going,’ said Mr Link. ‘You’ve been even less use than usual these last couple of months.’

I waited for him to say something good about my trench-digging abilities. He sipped his stout instead. Then he looked up.

‘I’m always sorry to see a good worker go,’ he said, ‘and I’m seeing one go now.’

I was startled and grateful. He caught my expression.

‘Bloody hell, not you,’ he said. ‘Our Spin here is leaving today. Got a job with local radio.’

Seemed about right, I thought. Spin had always had this thing about receiving signals.

VII

I left the building trade and got a job with the local council. I can’t say which one, because they’ll sue. I worked in the banking section. This made me think of heavily defended vaults and leather-topped desks, for reasons known only to my subconscious. The reality was less impressive. In a large open-plan office – much like the interior of one of the buildings I used to dig foundations for – rows of desks were set regular distances apart. The distances had been chosen to minimize what the team leaders had learned to call Unauthorized Human Interaction, which is to say chatting. There was a lunch hour which it was mandatory to take but which, it was hinted, might better be used for working in. There was an agreeable overtime rate for which no one qualified. A shift system meant that you always had to get up too early and always got home too late. At Christmas a certain amount of jollity would be tolerated: a few strands of sparse tinsel stapled to the ceiling tiles for twelve days.

I would get in at 7.30 AM, regardless of which shift I was on, because I couldn’t afford a car and the bus service was unreliable. I would switch on my computer so that the people in IT would know I was there.

IT was housed on the top floor in a chaotic office full of dangling wires and tangled cables and parts of things that had become dislodged. IT was not subject to the same rules as other departments. IT had a different timescale. They would say, I’ll be there in five minutes. They would arrive in anything up to a month. Everyone wanted to work in IT but there was no way to get there without having arcane and detailed knowledge of Babylon 5.

After logging in, I would look out of a window until nine when a few other people would start to trickle in. I would open up a spreadsheet or two and mess about with figures.

I would do that for eight hours. Then I would go home.

I once asked the man at the next desk to mine – a breach of council policy but I was in a daredevil sort of a mood – what happened to all of the figures we put into spreadsheets.

‘Well,’ he said, pushing his spectacles onto his nose, ‘when we finish each sheet they are amalgamated into another spreadsheet and ratified against a third spreadsheet held at head office. If they match, they are themselves amalgamated into another spreadsheet. Each of these transactions is logged on a fifth spreadsheet. This fifth spreadsheet is checked against the performance timetable laid down in the spreadsheet kept at area headquarters, and then the results of all of these cross-checks are entered into a spreadsheet.’

‘And then?’

‘Then they bin it and we start all over again.’

‘Why?’

He looked at me. His spectacles – the perennially unfashionable type with a heavy black frame – began their descent to the end of his nose.

‘What?’ he asked, confused.

‘Why? Why do we do all of this work just to have it thrown away?’

He looked at me some more.

‘Because they pay us to,’ he said, and never spoke to me again.

VIII

I still work there. I’ve moved up, or rather across. Diagonally, really. I’ve moved diagonally. I now lead a team of six people. I know the names of four of them. I meet with other team leaders and we discuss our teams as though we were talking about badly behaved pets. I have been on courses designed to encourage bonding between staff, and I have not been in any way encouraged to bond with staff.

I’m like everyone else out there in the world of meaningless office jobs. It’s what I do in the daytime to pay for the rest of my life. It’s what I do to pay for what I do.

The rest of my life is far more interesting. For example, there’s my best friend, Jack who can’t go through those metal detectors in airports without bells going off and guns being drawn.

Chapter Two
I

After working on building sites I was glad to have a job in an office. I wanted a job in an office. I also didn’t want one. I wanted to be unconventional, but I didn’t have the money for it. An office job would provide the money to be unconventional, but an office job was all about being conventional. I had to fit in to make enough money not to fit in.

Having an office job meant being unconventional in less exciting ways. I would put paper clips in the drawing pin box. I coloured in red sections of the year planner that should have been coloured yellow. This wasn’t the sort of anarchy I’d imagined when I listened to the Sex Pistols all those years ago. So an office job was conventional, I was right about that. I was only wrong about the money.

I must have got something wrong somewhere. I had less money than when I was a student earning nothing. In those days there had been more money to spend. Working on building sites the money turned up in envelopes and there was no mention of tax. Working in an office, the money didn’t turn up. Once a month I got a piece of paper explaining where most of my wages had gone and how much of them I could keep. Then the B&S Building Society kept the rest. I began to want to work on the building sites again, getting fat little envelopes at weekly intervals and telling B&S nothing about it.

I had outgoings. I had to pay the rent and buy groceries and bus passes and other non-frivolous items, like cigarettes. Cigarettes aren’t frivolous; the health warnings prove it. I don’t like smoking, but not being able to afford to smoke makes me want to smoke. It wasn’t as though I had money to burn. I didn’t even have money for firelighters. My wages belonged to everyone but me. Leaving little for entertainments. Once a week I’d go for a drink with Jack and get mildly confused. We usually went to the Messy Duck, a quiet pub which was situated down the road from the zoo, standing alone next to an area of ground designated unsuitable for buildings. I would look over the ground with my practised trench-digger’s eyes, spotting the greasy pools of rainbow-topped water, the cracks leading down to the mineshafts, the thrown bricks and the broken glass, the condoms.

I couldn’t understand that. There must have been better places. Even in Dudley.

The Messy Duck was a quiet pub. I’d been in louder monasteries. You often got the impression that you were keeping the landlord up. He was a thin man with sad eyes and an off-putting manner. At around ten he’d switch off the jukebox and unplug the fruit machine. Between ten and half past he’d yawn pointedly. After that he’d just turn off the lights and stand by the door, holding it open. I would feel uncomfortable and intrusive, but it didn’t bother Jack. He seemed to like being in uncomfortable situations. That helped to explain his hobby, I suppose. He would have to enjoy being uncomfortable. How else could you explain his piercings? They were all about discomfort. If they didn’t bother him, they bothered the people around him.

Jack was coloured and studded. I didn’t know the full extent of it – I didn’t want to know, there were parts of him I wouldn’t want to see in any condition, with or without rivets – but I knew that it was extensive. I imagined bolts and studs connected by chains. I imagined nails driven into areas of unnatural colour. I didn’t know what sort of tattoos he had. I doubted whether he went for the old-fashioned tigers and hearts with daggers. He’d prefer something more modern, like Celtic twiddles and spirals, or perhaps barcodes.

I could have been wrong. For all I knew he had a portrait of Britney across his pectorals and Made In England etched across his scalp. I found out what he actually had much later, under distressing circumstances.

We’ll get to that later.

‘Why?’ I once asked him. ‘Why go through all the pain and risk? All those stories you hear about people getting tattoos at little shops then going down with leprosy and melting into their cornflakes. Why not stick with jigsaws?’

‘It’s not that painful mate,’ he said. ‘Not as bad as going to the dentist.’

‘I thought you enjoyed going to the dentist.’

‘I do,’ he said, surprised. ‘Except the noise of the drill.’

‘So you like being hurt? It’s a masochism thing?’

‘No. It hurts, but that’s not all of it. That’s the start. You break your arm, you’ve got a bond with any other bloke with a broken arm. Start a conversation like that.’ He clicked his fingers without making a noise. He’d never got the hang of it. ‘Everyone pierced is with you. Everyone else is waiting to come in. It’s a ritual thing isn’t it? I don’t know, mate. You’re the fucking graduate. Why do you think I do it?’

‘Because you’re unstable.’

‘Could be that, granted.’

He had a mouthful of beer and looked thoughtful. At that time the eyebrow ring was new, and he was swollen and intrusively red. I couldn’t look him in the eye. I had to look at the wound.

‘You do it for attention,’ I thought out loud.

‘Course I don’t. What about all the stuff you can’t see? How’s that attracting attention? Take away the stuff in my face and I’m normal.’

‘I wouldn’t say you were normal.’

‘I wouldn’t say you were.’

‘At least I don’t set alarms off at airports.’

‘You don’t go to airports. You don’t go anywhere. That’s what this is. That’s why you don’t get it. I’ve gone somewhere else. I’ve become someone else. I’ve taken my body and changed it.’

I wasn’t sure about that. The more I knew about body modification, the more I thought it was all to do with filling in blanks. If you weren’t complete, if your identity wasn’t fully drawn, then you coloured yourself in or nailed a new identity to yourself. It was all about superheroes. Outwardly, they were normal, but under the clothes someone else, run through with metalwork, extravagantly tinted.

‘I set off alarms,’ he said, ‘because I transmit. I have wires and connections. I’m a radio. I pick up traffic reports. I pick up messages people like you don’t get. I send out signals.’

‘You’re sending some out now,’ I said. I’d known Jack for many years but I wasn’t one hundred per cent sure that he wouldn’t produce a knife and lay waste to the local population. Which, at the moment, was me. I looked for help. There was the landlord. He would be useless. It was down to me to deal with Jack’s insanity. I’d always thought he might have a screw loose. Possibly an actual screw, somewhere around his genitals. So I did what I had to do. I let Jack carry on, and I nodded from time to time. I can’t help it. I’m British.

‘Different signals,’ Jack was saying. I’d missed something.

‘Oh yes,’ I said, ‘very true.’

‘I’ve become a matrix,’ he said.

‘Spin used to say there were matrices at building sites,’ I said.

‘The scaffolding?’

I nodded.

‘I wouldn’t know about that,’ said Jack.

That had been a month ago, in the same pub, at about the same time of night. Since then Jack had had the bodywork touched up in a few new places. He turned up late, halfway through my second pint. I knew he’d had something new pierced, because he was walking as though he had a porcupine between his thighs. He was wearing a jumper that had been washed on the incorrect cycle. The sleeves ended inches before his hands began. His wrists were covered in bright swirls and healing scabs. He bought us a pint each and sat, wincing.

‘Oof,’ he said, reaching under the table and tugging at something.

‘Do you mind?’

‘Not really,’ he said. ‘Ow. Ow. I don’t think that’s where you belong, is it?’

He fidgeted and fiddled and finally settled, nicely uncomfortable.

‘What’s it this time?’ I asked. I had to know, even though I didn’t really want to. It was like watching operations on television. I’d want to switch channels or put my hands over my eyes. Instead I’d sit and watch, horrified. He shuffled carefully. When he winced, his eyebrow ring stood straight out from his brow.

‘Perineum ring,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Perineum. It’s the hairy bit at the back of your bollocks.’

‘I know what it is. I meant, “What?”’

‘I hadn’t had it done yet.’ As if that explained it. ‘These stools are a bit hard, aren’t they?’ He adjusted himself indecorously.

‘Not really, no. Perhaps having your perineum pierced has made you sensitive.’

‘I won’t be riding my bike for a couple of weeks, that’s fucking certain.’

‘So it’s the bus, is it?’

‘It will be this week. Perhaps I’ll catch you on your way home. Everything nice at the office, is it? No sudden shortages of pens or anything?’

Jack often baited me like this. He was saying my life was mundane. I knew that. I was the one living it. I sometimes had an urge to hide a powerful magnet somewhere near Jack, just to see what happened. He settled at an angle, as though preparing to fart. The landlord eyed him sleepily.

‘You should try piercing,’ Jack said.

‘I don’t want to try it, but if I’m ever taken captive by the Spanish Inquisition I’ll put them on to you. You’d get on like a castle on fire.’

‘What’s that? History jokes from the history student? Three years taking drugs care of Johnny taxpayer and you think you know everything. Seeing as I kept you in beer all that time, while I was working for a living, I’ll let you get the next round in.’

I got the next round in.

‘Is he the full shilling?’ the landlord asked me, nodding at Jack.

‘He’s missing some loose change. Actually, he’s all loose change.’

‘Looks like he’s wearing it in his ears. My daughter goes in for all that. Face like a cheesegrater. I tell her she’ll end up no good, attracting some pervert into kitchenware.’ He subsided and looked miserably at the crisp boxes.

‘It’ll just be a phase,’ I said. He gave me a gloomy look.

‘They said that about bloody disco music.’ He returned to his inspection of the crisps and I returned to Jack.

‘Cheers,’ said Jack, taking his pint. His mouth was pierced but he didn’t have any liprings in. They interfered with drinking. He had a small barbell through his nasal septum, his eyebrow ring, and a cluster of rings and studs in each ear. It was all low-key. I saw worse at the bus stop. But it gave me an iceberg feeling; his most dangerous features were out of sight. Under his clothes there would be all sorts of awful things, tintacks and fishhooks, staples and cutlery. He didn’t have many in his face because of his job. He worked at a printers outside Oldbury and the management didn’t allow facial jewellery. They feared that some dangling item might get caught in the machinery, leading to death or litigation. At the least, that day’s print run would be ruined. It wasn’t a big company. They did special supplements for the local papers, posters for local rock groups, one-off histories of the local area, that sort of thing. Sometimes they’d bring out limited runs of the latest book by one of the local authors. These were sold in local shops to nobody I ever met. Jack had joined as an apprentice and had worked his way up to foreman.

I hadn’t been to the printers. I imagined it to be a huge dark building, enormously lengthy and tall, with remote thin windows. It would be full of complicated machinery, wheezing and huffing; wetly-printed papers would be shuffled all over the place by conveyor belts, carried to the ceiling and thrown into loops and vertical drops like screaming people at a theme park. Apprentices in inky overalls would pull tall levers and operate sprockets; from time to time, with a thin shriek, one of them would be gathered by the machinery and whirled around the room.

Jack emptied his glass.

‘That’ll be your round,’ he said. He’d lost count. It wasn’t worth arguing about. That was all I seemed to do with Jack, hang about on the outskirts of an argument we never actually visited. I couldn’t remember how we’d been at school. Perhaps we’d been exactly the same. I got another two pints. When I took them back to the table, Jack was fiddling with a beermat. I was relieved to see that he’d stopped adjusting his metalwork. It was embarrassing, even though there was only the landlord there and he was more interested in his crisps. He held up the beermat and studied it.

‘We did a run of these,’ he said, ‘with jokes on. For a beer festival in Humberside. We all had to bring a joke in. They didn’t use mine.’

I didn’t ask Jack what the joke was. His jokes were the sort Bernard Manning would have turned down as too offensive. ‘So how is the printing trade? Any interesting gossip from our local reporters?’

‘Someone’s filling the mines with stuff. Banned toxic stuff so horrible you couldn’t even offload it in fucking Guatemala, and someone’s lobbing it under Dudley. The hospital’s sinking into the ground. Teenage literacy is down, teenage pregnancies are up, and teenagers should be seen and not fucking heard.’

‘The usual, then,’ I said. Jack nodded his head in agreement.

‘I saw Eddie Finch the other week,’ he said.

‘Oh?’

‘Said he’d be in for a drink later. If nothing came up. He has to man the phones in case a story breaks. Pensioner loses cat, cat loses sense of direction, man paying by cheque is killed by everyone else in the supermarket. It must be all fucking go, working on the Herald.’

Eddie Finch worked on the Pensnett Herald, which covered the events in Pensnett. Pensnett was a stretch of road outside Dudley with three shops and a bad reputation. I’d never been there myself, but I knew someone who’d stopped for a newspaper and escaped with stitches and a persistent nervous twitch and was told he was lucky. There was a fun run there once a year, which was like the London Marathon only you ran a lot faster. The Herald was always full of crime reports and obituaries. Like the notices in the local shop windows, it suffered from displaced apostrophes. Eddie covered some of the reporting, most of the horoscopes and all of the frequent letters from ‘Angry of Kingswinford’. He was a minor reporter on a minuscule newspaper. He drank, however, as though he was auditioning for a place in Fleet Street before Fleet Street moved out of Fleet Street. From time to time he’d join us for a drink. Though I didn’t often drink much, if Eddie joined us, I would drink more. More than I could cope with, usually. Then I’d wake up dizzy and lost with a glutinous headache and vague memories of appalling things that, it would turn out, I had done.

‘He said he’d be in by nine,’ said Jack, checking his watch.

‘Is he?’

‘Not unless this is bolloxed. Probably just as well if he doesn’t come in. Lisa doesn’t like him much.’

‘Because he drinks?’

‘Because he’s a journalist. She doesn’t trust them. She says everything you tell them goes in the papers.’

‘I’ve told him lots of things and he hasn’t put any of them in the paper.’

‘You don’t have anything worth printing. Not these days. I think we could have kept him in material when we were young.’

‘I don’t know. Anyway, Lisa’s right. I don’t trust Eddie. Not when he’s drunk.’

‘He’s always fucking drunk.’

‘There you are then.’

I wasn’t sure where I was. The conversation kept heading off somewhere, then turning back before it got there. Jack was on his way to another subject. Perhaps he wanted to talk about Lisa. He usually did. She was his girlfriend. They had met at some sort of convention for body-piercing aficionados. It had been held at Stourbridge town hall. The two of them had noticed each other across a room full of pinned flesh. Chromed instruments curved out of the crowd; by the light of surgical lamps they started to chat, and snapped together like a ring binder. They had met again a day or two later and one thing had led to one more thing. One more thing had gone on for a month, and then Lisa moved in with Jack and Jack decorated several rooms.

It all sounded serious to me. I fell head over heels all the time, but I’d never done any decorating. I watched decorating on the television while I was waiting for a real programme to come on. Decorating happened at a stage of a relationship that I had either missed or never reached. I thought that it would probably be the latter. I could start relationships, but I wasn’t very good at them. It was like starting fights after a few drinks. It made sense at the time, but you ended up with a headache and no money and all of your mates wishing you’d shut up about it.

I hadn’t met Lisa. Jack said she was wonderful, but I wasn’t going to take his word for anything. He was hardly going to say she was an old boiler with a bosom full of rivets. That’s not the sort of thing you say in the first couple of months. If you get through the first six months you can say anything you like. I think. I’ve never got past four.

I must have been picking the wrong girls.

Jack was happy with Lisa. I knew this because he kept telling me so. He told me so more often than I wanted him to, and after he’d had a few more drinks he’d tell me about it non-stop.

He had a few more drinks.

‘She’s lovely,’ he said, ‘she’s a peach. You hear that? She’s a peach.’

‘Round and hairy?’ I asked.

‘None of yours,’ he said, ‘as it happens. None of your business. She’s wonderful. I don’t know what she’s doing with me.’

‘Perhaps she got one of her rings caught in one of yours. What are you going to do? Is there room between the tattoos to fit her name in? Or is it just going to be her initials?’

Jack went several shades darker. ‘That’s you, isn’t it? Always having a go. You’ve never got this far. Know why? Because you’d rather be out there taking the piss. Have you ever been in love?’

‘Yes,’ I said, truthfully. I was forever falling in love. It was easy; like falling off a bike. I was in love right then. I was going steady with a girl, as it happened.

I’ll tell you about her later.

‘Well then,’ he said, ‘well then. This is real. Lisa is different. This is different.’

‘They’re all different. You said that Jo Branigan and Andrea Horton were different. You thought both of them were different at the same time, for a week. Then you decided they were actually the same.’

‘Lisa is different differently.’

He looked at me helplessly, drunk and infatuated.

‘It’s the same,’ I said, not knowing why I was pushing him. It was instinctive. It was easier than falling off a bike.

‘This is different,’ he insisted.

‘Oh yes, you work in a printers so naturally you know more about anything than I do, I’m just the one who went to university.’

‘What do you know about? Books. You wouldn’t know the real world if it smacked you in the face.’

‘If I smacked you in the face you’d know about it.’

I wasn’t sure how the conversation had turned nasty. Beer, probably.

‘How about if you murdered me?’ asked Jack, leaning into the conversation. ‘You’re the history man. You know why? Because you don’t want to remember your own history. You want to go back before that. You want other people’s memories. I remember everything.’ He rolled back his sleeve; swirls and spirals ran up his arm, between swellings and scabs. ‘Look at this,’ he said, ‘I’m receptive. You with me? I’m receptive.’

‘Receptive to hepatitis B, septicaemia, traffic reports …’

That calmed him down. ‘Have it your way then,’ he said. ‘How’s the niece?’

‘Haven’t seen her since I went to university.’

‘Typical student. How old is she now then? Three, four?’

‘Four.’

‘You know she’s never met her Uncle Jack?’

I did know that. I liked it that way.

‘I’ll tell you what, I’m not doing anything Saturday. We’ll pop round and see her. And your brother, we don’t see him much now.’

‘We fell out. Family things.’

‘Oh yes. Right. So I’ll pick you up about eleven then, and we’ll go and see what they’re up to these days.’

Wonderful, I thought. That’d be a smashing day out.