Of all the shameful secrets that a young man in today’s society can possess, the deadliest has nothing to do with sex, or money, or even crime. It is simply this: that he lives with his mother.
Young men are supposed to be virile and unheeding. They are meant to strike out fearlessly and never look back. Those who fail to do so, or do so and fail, invite general derision, just as surely as if they wore socks under their sandals.
Especially when living with their mother means living in Neasden. Amongst the suburbs of London, Neasden effortlessly inhabits the upper echelons of undesirability, along with Croydon, Plaistow, Catford and Penge. There’s something about the place that sucks away optimism. Even in the brightest sunshine, the streets have a kind of otherworldly patina of failure and decay.
And yet it is there, right there, just down the road from Shenanigan’s Irish Tavern and the Beverley Hills Nail Bar, that we first encounter the hero of our story: Nigel Percival Shadley, the Baudelaire of Neasden Lane, hunched over a letter in the front room of his mother’s house.
Not that there was anything particularly Baudelairian about his immediate surroundings. Marilyn Shadley’s non-descript semi distinguished itself from the others that flanked it with a sign over the front door that read “Chez Shadley” and a dozen statuettes of cavorting cherubs in the gravelled front garden. Inside, the house was decorated with a mixture of Fifties kitsch and unwanted, unwantable Victoriana which Marilyn had salvaged from a hundred Sunday morning car boot sales and constituted a style she liked to call “Rococo”.
But perhaps the spirit of the great French poet of revolt and despair did linger in the figure of her son, who sat on a chintz chaise longue in a striped Debenhams bathrobe, and stared in silent hatred at the letter he had received in the post just a few minutes before. It read:
Dear Mr Coleridge-Forbes, (about this pseudonym, more in a moment)
We have read your submission with interest but regret to say we shall not be able to include it in any future issues of Circumference magazine.
Yours sincerely,
(A squiggle)
Tabitha Atonement,
Editor
Nigel would have torn the letter into pieces, but something about the potent cocktail of resentment, loathing and wounded pride it stirred up within him was too compelling to relinquish. His attention clung inexorably to one single word:
submission
“Nigel Coleridge-Forbes did not enter the world of letters to carry out acts of submission!” thought Nigel furiously to himself. “He came to sweep all before him – acclaim, royalty cheques, literary prizes, the works! What a cheek this damnable woman has to talk about the Neasden Cantos as a “submission” rather than to designate my peerless masterwork by name! To be so idiotic, so steeped in barbarism that she cannot even dignify her mole-like short-sightedness by writing back to admit her own fallibility, resigning from the editorship of Circumference magazine and quite possibly bowing out of literary life altogether…
And just as Nigel’s train of thought had grown so violent that the letter he held looked in imminent danger of ripping all together, his mother entered with her vacuum cleaner, and began hoovering around him.
“Would you turn that infernal machine off, woman!”
Marilyn Shadley was a woman of fifty-two, dressed in a fuchsia jogging suit with the word “Babe” inscribed across her bottom. She had a cigarette in her mouth, and every so often made little detours with the hoover to vacuum up her own dropped ash.
“Don’t you woman me, you little scamp,” said Marilyn, switching off her machine momentarily. “What’s that, anyway? Another letter for Mr Coler-whatsit? I don’t know why you don’t stick to the name you was born with.”
“Shadley, Mother, is irredeemably plebeian.” This was a decision Nigel had come to early. At the age of ten, after one too many Errol Flynn films, he made a brief, unsuccessful experiment in upgrading his name to Nigel de Shadley. But the merriment this caused among his schoolmasters forced a rethink. A few years later, Coleridge-Forbes emerged from his fevered adolescent imaginings. It had, he thought, just the right connotations of literary pizzazz and limitless wealth.
“Shadley was good enough for your father.”
“Quite.”
“We should never have sent you to that posh school.” Marilyn Shadley stubbed out her cigarette in an ashtray which bore the inscription ‘A Present from Camber Sands’. “When you gonna get off your arse and mow that back lawn, anyway? This is the fourth Saturday of asking.”
“I would have thought from the retainer I pay you, you could afford to engage the services of a gardener.”
“After food and bills, fifty pound a week don’t pay for the running of a stately home, Nigel.”
By this point, Marilyn had finished with the hoover and was pouring herself a glass of gin and vermouth at the home bar.
“10.45 is a bit early to start drinking isn’t it? Even for you?”
“I have been slaving for hours.”
“I rather doubt that. The pan from your fried egg sandwich this morning was hot to the touch when I came down. And that was scarcely more than twenty minutes ago.” Nigel made a play of re-reading his letter, but as it contained nothing whatsoever of consolation, he returned to his mother. “Couldn’t you go down to Shenanigan’s, instead of desecrating the family home with your debauchery at this hour of the day?”
But Shenanigan’s, in which a platoon of lorry drivers, carpet fitters and would-be professional gamblers took it in turn to lay court to Marilyn whenever she entered did not tempt Nigel’s mother this morning.
“Can’t, Nigel – I got to get ready. Your Uncle Derek’s coming to Sunday dinner tomorrow.”
“Lunch, Mother, lunch.”
Marilyn Shadley took a long, soothing draught of her gin and vermouth. “We should never have sent you to that posh school,” she said.
The name Coleridge-Forbes had, he thought, just the right connotations of literary pizzazz and limitless wealth.
“I must have been mad to agree to this.”
“It’s not that bad, Misty. Look, they’ve got veggie options.”
“Not this place. Love Train.”
Misty Ponder sat with her friend Steph Driscoll in the Leicester Square branch of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Friday’s. The choice of restaurant had been Steph’s, as had the evening’s coming excitements. Both were dressed for battle. Steph wore a low-cut dress and a jangly necklace that spilled with would-be mesmeric effect into her cleavage. Misty wore jeans and a black T-shirt with the slogan: ‘Do You Even Care?’
“Come on, Misty, it’ll be fun.
“I just…”
“I know, Misty, I know. I know all about your hang-ups with men and stuff.”
“They are not hang ups.”
“No…”
“They’re reservations.”
A sudden light came into Steph Driscoll’s eyes: “Yeah, reservations aboard the love train!” She pulled on an imaginary cord, like a train driver sounding his whistle. “Poot! Poot!”
“You guys decided what you’re having?”
A waitress stood before them.
“I think I need a couple more minutes,” said Misty.
“Well, I don’t,” said Steph. “I’ll take the chilli dog absolutely smothered in sour cream. And the country style potatoes…and then…”
“I must have been mad to agree to this.”
“This is preposterous,” said Nigel.
“It rocks, my man,” said Sean Riley.
“Speed dating is bad enough. But a speed dating night called Love Train…”
“It rocks, Nigel, majorly.”
“I wish you wouldn’t talk like that.”
“Like what?”
“‘Majorly’.”
“Will you just chill the F out? Tonight is gonna be beautiful. Besides, did Columbus discover America by complaining?”
“He didn’t, the Vikings did.”
“So my point holds – P.R. matters.”
“That was last Saturday’s discussion.”
Sean Riley was Nigel’s oldest friend, and his most enduring link to what is sometimes called Normality. Not that there was anything overwhelmingly normal about Sean, who made his living teaching English as a foreign language in Vilnius, and spent most of his free time attempting to convince a string of eighteen-year-old Lithuanian girls to go to bed with him. They had become friends at school, after teaming up to humiliate the school bully, Craig Cutler, by putting crushed up laxative pills in his sandwiches. Sean, whose father was a chemist, had sourced the laxatives. Nigel had done the deed. It had been a momentous victory and something of a high point in their friendship. Nowadays they rarely saw eye-to-eye in quite the same way.
“Speed dating is the last gasp of a dying culture,” said Nigel. “The final, decadent twitching of a doomed civilisation.”
“I wish you wouldn’t talk like that.” There was a pause. “Why are you dressed like that, anyway?” Sean asked.
Nigel was wearing a beige corduroy suit and a paisley cravat. “Conventional enough dress, I should have thought, for an evening of light conversation.”
“You don’t learn, do you?”
Sean was wearing distressed jeans and a spangly silver shirt with a winged collar, having read somewhere in his small library of seduction guides that women are attracted to anything that sparkles.
Anyway, drink up,” he said. “It starts at seven.” Sean downed the remains of his fizzing lager in a draught, then slammed his glass down on the pub tabletop. “And remember – you can say more or less anything to these chicks, but don’t ask them what they do for a living.”
“Why not?”
“It’ll make you sound like a career-obsessed London wanker.”
“I must have been mad to agree to this.”
Love Train took place in a West End night club of the sort that is frequented by hairdressers out on the razz and young men who think that overcoats are a sign of weakness. The place was all black paint, mosaics of mirrored glass, peach lighting and overpriced drinks. The two dozen twenty-somethings who had assembled for the event milled about directionlessly. At their centre stood Crista Bliss, a middle-aged Yorkshirewoman who possessed not so much a personal style as a number of ruses that had proved startling enough to disguise her own obesity: burgundy hair, a gold-embroidered smock, copious jewellery and a shrieking laugh. Over her tremendous bosom hung a stop watch and a referee’s whistle. In her hand was a microphone.
“OK, lovestomers!” she bellowed into the mike. “I don’t like to call you customers, see, because you’re more than customers to us, darlings, really you are.” She looked out at her lovestomers. They looked back – dazed, faintly hopeful, like survivors of some mild but recent traumatic event. “You’re passengers on the love train, seekers on love’s great journey, skirmishers in life’s long war for emotional fulfilment. Phew!” Crista Bliss paused to refresh herself lustily from the dimpled tankard of Tetley bitter at her elbow. “Sometimes I surprise myself with my own loquaciousness, lovestomers, really I do.” She panted. “But now, darlings, it’s time to commence your canoodling and begin your besotting, as I give you three minutes to find love…starting….now!”
Christa blew her whistle and they were off.
“So what do you do, then?”
A few moments later, Nigel was standing in front of a dead-eyed blonde woman in a white blouse. She swizzled the stem of her empty martini glass like some infinitely world-weary song-and-dance man twirling his cane. Clearly, coming across as a career-obsessed London wanker didn’t bother her in the slightest.
“I’m a poet.”
“A poet?” The dead eyes opened a little wider. Faint amusement glittered.
“Yes.”
“Is that why you’re wearing that funny little scarf?”
“But didn’t the clergyman object?”
“What do you mean?”
“The clergyman who baptised you – didn’t he object?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Your name. Misty. Surely he’d be obliged to object? There is no Saint Misty. The name has no precedent, Biblical or ecclesiastical.”
“I was born in the Ozarks…”
“The where?”
“The Ozark Mountains in Missouri. I was named by a Native American my mother happened to be having a chaste relationship with at the time. The night I was born was dark.”
“Naturally.”
Misty ignored this impertinence. “Dark and silent. The crickets made no noise. Even the whippoorwill ceased their moan. As my mother went deeper and deeper into labour, a thick fog descended and…she named me Misty.”
There was a pause. Then Nigel said: “It must be wonderful.”
?
“To be named after a meteorological phenomenon.”
“Is that sarcasm?”
A chill had descended between them, not unlike the heavy Missouri fog that had heralded Misty’s entrance into the world. And there was still one minute and twenty-three seconds of the encounter to go. Speed dating was supposed to abolish such awkward silences. Yet for Nigel and Misty, it seemed, no speed could be too great.
One minute, eighteen seconds to go. Nigel’s brain hunted for something to say. That most stalwart conversational gambit – the weather – was clearly out of the question. What to say? What to say? Finally, he took the nuclear option. How much worse could it get?
“What do you do?”
“I’m an activist.”
“An activist? For whom?”
“For myself, for humanity, for the planet. What do you do?”
“I’m a poet.”
Then there came a great blast from Crista Bliss’s whistle.
“OK, lovestomers!” Crista clapped her hands. “Cease your courting now! It’s time to shake up the schmoozing and freshen up the flirting as you move on to your next encounter, please!”
Nigel’s next encounter; his next skirmish in the great war for emotional fulfilment. An Australian woman in a very low cut top.
“Hi, I’m Steph.”
“Hullo.”
“I saw you chatting away with my mate, Misty. You like her?”
“Er…”
“Not sure, eh? Well, never mind. I like you. You’ve got nice eyes.” Steph gave Nigel’s cravat a flirtatious little tug.
“It’s a cravat, actually.”
“Oh.”
They sipped their drinks.
“So what size are you?” Crista asked.
“What?”
“What’s your cock size, love? And I need it in centimetres. I’m an Australian, as you can probably tell, and as a proud Republican I don’t buy into all that Imperial crap.”
“What?”
“Imperial measures. They’re a load of macaroni. Pints, shillings… I mean, what is that shit?”
“Oh, quite.”
“So what is it?
“?”
“Your size? You look sweet, but I need to know. A lot of women will tell you that size doesn’t matter, it’s about how you feel about a person. But take it from me, size does matter. Girth, principally.”
Later, much later, as he stood in the darkness waiting for a bus, his cape saturating in the steady drizzle, Nigel fell to meditation. Where was his ideal girl? He wanted, very roughly, the heroine of a Victorian novel – a girl as delicate as porcelain and much given to fainting fits. Someone who viewed the Twenty-First Century with the same uncomprehending disdain as he did. In eight years of adult life, his most significant relationship had been a two-week fling with a forty-year-old sex maniac divorcee from Azerbaijan. She had cooked him buckwheat pancakes with sour cream and dill. She had taken him hare-coursing in Epping. Very occasionally she sent him greeting cards with a Baku postmark and a little handwritten message of ‘Hepy Cristmas’.
Ah, Brezhneva!
He took out his phone and sent a text to Sean:
I am a man more dated against than dating.
A few minutes later, his bus arrived. And up on the top deck, ensconced amid the reek of donor meat and jabber of Portuguese from his fellow passengers, he received a reply from Sean:
Never a truer word, Nigel. Listen, would love to chat but have this incredible Oz girl here desperate to get to grips with my 28cm.
It was typical, thought Nigel, for Sean to know his penis size in metric units.
“I don’t like to call you customers, see, because you’re more than customers to us, darlings, really you are.”
Next morning, Nigel was at his typewriter. All about him were spread the Sunday papers. A tray of bearing orange juice, coffee, a boiled egg and soldiers was at his side. He wrote:
Dear Cretin,
Then he considered a minute, went back, struck through the word “cretin” with a row of angry x’s, and wrote instead:
Dear xxxxxx Sir,
A façade of formal respect masking a coruscating disdain, thought Nigel. Perfect. Then he wrote in earnest:
Re your article on finding Rimbaud’s Les Illuminations “a trifle heavy-going”.
Of all the drivellings you pour out week after week on an undeserving public, this sorry piece of bigoted ranting took the biscuit. Are you not aware that in parading your own mental and spiritual inadequacies to the reading public, you merely embarrass yourself? Clearly not – from your byline photograph it is clear you are imbued not simply with an unwarranted self-regard but a mountainous egotism – an amour propre so overwhelming as to border on insanity. Yet if you had the merest ounce of self-knowledge, you would don sackcloth and ashes and spend the rest of your days wandering the barren places of the earth, beating you chest with shame.
Yours in contempt,
A reader.
Having written this, Nigel sat back, and dipped a soldier into his egg with evident satisfaction. Once he had polished off the remains of his breakfast, he pulled the letter out of the jaws of the typewriter, sealed it in an envelope, addressed it and placed it on top of other, similar such correspondence (letters to politicians, DJs, radio presenters - anyone, really, unfortunate enough to encounter Nigel’s ire) he had completed that day. His Sunday mornings were usually spent like this – a thorough perusal of the newspapers to identify any particular niggles in the world’s general downward spiral, then explosive epistolary attack, like a charge by hussars. Usually his letter-writing went some way to salve the collected humiliations of the week. Yet somehow today it had not worked its usual magic, and a familiar ennui returned.
It was that same ennui that is suffered by anyone who has a job they despise and finds the weekend more than half gone: a sense of listlessness and missed opportunity, mingled with the ever-gaining threat of Monday. Nigel was a poet by vocation, but poetry does not pay, and he was forced to toil from Monday to Friday in the bowels of a City firm called Whoremonger and Citadel. His job title there was unflashy: General Assistant, Temporary.
Nigel looked around him. His bedroom was wallpapered with a pattern of fighter planes, tanks and battleships locked in perpetual, unmoving and perfectly symmetrical conflict against a background of intense blue: a theme no one had seen fit to change since he was nine years old. The wallpaper was interrupted rather abruptly by a monumental portrait of Napoleon exiled on St Helena which Nigel had bought secondhand in the Holloway Road. The painting showed the defeated Emperor staring tearfully out of a background of near complete blackness in a mood of almost unbearable gloom. This was the principal ornament of the room. The rest was mere utilitarian stuff. His clothes were kept in a state of some chaos in the open-doored wardrobe: his cape, his collection of ties and cravats, his beige corduroy suit. An ancient pin-striped job his father had passed down to him and was too big for him ever to wear. Also a rather ill-advised set of tweed knickerbockers he had bought from a shop in Jermyn Street because, having browsed too long among the miraculous fancy waistcoats and deerstalkers, he felt too embarrassed to leave empty-handed. There was a wind-up gramophone, with his slender collection of 78s leaning beside it: Pennies from Heaven, I Got a Right to Sing the Blues, a few Strauss waltzes and, perhaps most quixotically, Land of Hope and Glory. A few rows of books. Curling stacks of manuscripts.
Then he thought of the day ahead. It was 11.15. “Uncle” Derek, the unspeakably tiresome neighbour his mother invited over whenever there was no more compelling romantic prospect in play at Shenanigan’s, was coming for lunch. He would arrive soon, with his jumper tied over his shoulders and the half bottle of whisky he always brought to match Marilyn (no mean feat, this) drink for drink. Already, Nigel could picture the scene:
“Hello, son,” Derek would say.
“I’m not your son. If I were, I would drown myself.”
“Hee, hee! Full of piss ’n vinegar, ain’t he? Well, how about a little noggin, seeing as it’s Sunday, after all.”
“Don’t mind if I do, Del.”
“How about you, young ’un?” Derek would enquire, busying himself with receptacles for his scotch and Marilyn’s gin and vermouth.
“For some reason I fail to find alcoholic drinks terribly enticing at eleven o’clock in the morning.”
“Suit yourself. Though it is almost twelve,” Derek would say, jauntily consulting his fake Rolex.
“He ain’t got the worries what we’ve got, Del,” his mother would add.
“True enough!”
Worries! What did Derek know about Nigel’s worries? Did Derek understand what it meant to try and wrestle a literary reputation from an unwilling world? He ran a cycle shop in Stanmore.
Nigel longed to escape. But what were the non-Derek options? He was in no mood to risk a visit to a post-coitally triumphant Sean. He had a season ticket to the ICA, but the long season of Finnish Lesbian cinema they were currently showing on Sunday afternoons failed to entice. He could always go for a walk in Gladstone Park. Yet his meanderings there often led to altercations with the local hoodies who sat perched up on the bench nearest the entrance, as closely packed together as the battery chickens whose flesh they consumed out of cardboard boxes from the Tennessee Fried Chicken shop on Neasden Lane. Typically they would barrage him with abuse as he stalked by, reckoning him another wordless victim. Yet Nigel gave as good as he got, turning to shower them with such coruscating vituperation that quite often they could find only a few thwarted four-letter-words in return. Yet there had been setbacks too, such as the time he had unwisely responded to their catcalls by flinging a conker into their midst, to receive in return a hail of Tango cans, half-eaten drumsticks, pizza boxes, cigarettes, stones and a dried dog turd. His only defence had been to collapse to the ground, wrapped in his cape. One very expensive trip to the dry cleaners had followed.
From the drawer of his desk he took out a packet of the prohibitively expensive Black Russian cigarettes that he allowed himself on occasions of great crisis. Then he put on his 78 of Land of Hope and Glory and smoked, waving his cigarette like a conductor’s baton magisterially in time to the tune.
Wider still and wider
May thy bounds be set;
God that made thee mighty,
Make thee mightier yet!
As the record thundered to a close, there came the sound of his mother’s voice.
“Nigel! Dinner!”
He gave a low groan and stubbed out his cigarette.
Nigel was a poet by vocation, but poetry does not pay, and he was forced to toil from Monday to Friday in the bowels of a City firm called Whoremonger and Citadel. His job title there was unflashy: General Assistant, Temporary.
Nigel was not the only one having a difficult Sunday. A few miles south-east of Neasden, on the forbiddingly expensive thoroughfare that is Conduit Street stood a lone female figure outside London’s only branch of Mueck and Binoche. The red ribbon had only recently been cut on this outlet of vertiginously high fashion by Fernando Mueck, the brilliant but rather unsettling couturier who never left the house outside a corset and had recently themed a catwalk show around mink brassieres. The lone female figure, meanwhile, was Misty Ponder, Protester, Activist, Daughter of Missouri. She was dressed in a German Army Parka and heavy boots. The fingertips of her right hand, pink with cold, were wrapped round a placard which read:
DON’T BUY FUR
In the left pocket of her parka was a wad of cheaply produced leaflets detailing the grisly methods by which mink are farmed, ready to be handed out to interested passers by. But no passers by were interested. Well-heeled shoppers, Japanese tourists, the doormen of smart hotels on some errand or other: all came and went. None stopped for Misty.
Was there something a little disconsolate, then, about Misty Ponder that morning, as she stood there in the biting early April wind? Was she running low on that burning, almost sexual rage such protests usually engender – indeed require to be successful? She remembered demos from her student days on the campus of Missouri University – the throng of eager, angry people, the sense of shared will, of empowerment, of fun.
This wasn’t fun. This wasn’t empowering. This was just cold.
Then a taxi stopped outside Mueck and Binoche. A chicly-dressed woman debouched from the chugging vehicle and trotted high-heeled into the shop, darting Misty a withering look as she went.
“Murderer!” Misty shouted after her. And then the woman was gone, gone into that little cavern of deceptive lighting and designer cruelty.
“DON’T BUY FUR! DON’T BUY FUR!” Misty began shouting to the street at large, banging the end of her placard on the ground to emphasise each word.
Then, just as she was wondering how long she could keep this up, there came a tap on her shoulder. A young man in a goatee beard stood before her, wearing a blazing white Alpaca blazer. It was Luca Biscotti, the sales assistant at Mueck and Binoche.
“Listen, darling, don’t you have a husband or a family to go and spend Sunday with?”
Misty glared at him. “I’m unmarried,” she said. “My family are scattered amid the graveyards, bar-rooms and lunatic asylums of Missouri. And besides,” she continued, glancing at her watch, “given the time difference, none of them would be up yet.”
Luca tutted, ran his eyes disdainfully up and down Misty’s costume, and swept back into the shop.
“DON’T BUY FUR! DON’T BUY FUR!” Misty’s vigour was renewed by this small but undeniable conversational victory. But after taking a sharp lungful of bitterly cold air, she began to cough – a condition which, with the marvellous irrationality of the smoker, she attempted to quell with one of the roll-ups she had stored in a pocket of her parka. The roll-up proved only a partial solution, and as she coughed smoke into the chilly W1 air, she cursed.
“Fucking Caz! I am never doing the fur run on my own again!”
Doing the fur run – ie picketing Mueck and Binoche – had been the condition on which Misty was to be offered a room in Caz’s commune in Hackney Wick. Since her arrival in Britain five months before, Misty had been sleeping on a series of friends’ sofas and floors, with the occasional ludicrously expensive interlude on a hotel bed. It wasn’t that bad, she told herself, but Misty was not impervious to privacy and comfort, and the friend whose sofa she had availed herself of most – Steph Driscoll – seemed haunted by an endless parade of unknown men. It was in the very early mornings, mainly, that these strangers appeared, half-dressed or draped in towels. Tall men, short men, black men, white men, taxi drivers, barristers, hod-carriers, thieves. Quite often they seemed unaware where they were, who Misty was, who Steph was, even. Only this morning, a man in a spangly shirt who claimed to live in Lithuania had attempted to seduce her over a light breakfast of Nescafe and Embassy Number Ones.
Caz’s commune! Caz’s commune! She had repeated the magic words to herself in her head as she had gently explained to him that he had come with Steph and the gallant thing to do would be to stick with Steph – even though, as he so perceptively pointed out, Steph was currently deep in vodka-coshed sleep…
Caz’s commune. How could a commune be the property of anyone? And yet so it was, or so it seemed, as she sat with Caz and the other communards round their kitchen table in Hackney Wick, mulling over whether Misty could join, what her role could be, how she could justify the occupation of an entire room – a room that could otherwise be given over to leaflet printing, or marijuana cultivation, or the housing of a perpetually stoned, heavily bearded man called Carlos who they had met in Pound City and claimed to have been a key figure in the Sandanistas. Caz had asked her as much, as the heavy smoke of a shared joint curled to the kitchen ceiling, as eyes watched her intently.
What use could she be? What contribution could she make?
Oh, anything, really, Misty had smiled.
And here she was, doing the fur run, with vague promise from Caz that she would “swing by if she got the chance”. It wasn’t fair of Caz to expect her to protest on her own. To protest, you had to be en masse. Protesting on your own was just, well, complaining. And Caz talked herself up as this big activist. If you were an activist you weren’t supposed to pressurize other people, to throw your weight around. You were supposed to stand up for the weak and oppressed – sweat-shop workers, indigenous rainforest tribes, minks. It wasn’t fucking right.
“DON’T BUY FUR! DON’T BUY FUR! THESE PEOPLE ARE MURDERERS!”
Her anger against Caz buoyed her against Mueck and Binoche. But the effect was short-lived. All of a sudden she felt with renewed force just how cold and hoarse and alone she was.
And then, over the road she caught sight of a branch of Starbucks. It glowed cosily, a beacon of homely American warmth in the comfortless grey streetscape.
Starbucks was an emblem of cultural imperialism and corporate hegemony. Starbucks was responsible for the pillage of the world’s resources, the death of independent traders, the brandification of the world. Starbucks was the Anti-Christ of hot, frothy drinks.
Starbucks was open. Starbucks was warm. Starbucks would sell her a grande mochaccino with whipped cream and chocolate sprinkles.
She hesitated. Then from the pocket of her German army parka came the trill of an incoming text:
Sorry babe am not gonna be able to do mueck. Caz X
Nobody called Misty babe – not even Caz, who had shaken hands with John Pilger. Disgusted, she threw her placard down in the gutter and strode over the road to Starbucks. The guilt she felt as she ordered a mochaccino (take-out, not drink-in: political activism is not the most lucrative of callings) was obliterated by relief finally to be out of the cold. And her day’s work was over now, anyway, she reflected, as she paid the barista and took a first blissful sip of the soothing drink – she couldn’t very well carry on picketing Mueck and Binoche with a Starbucks cup in her hand, could she?
She shuffled to the door, lapping at her coffee and luxuriating in the warmth she would soon have to leave.
Then on the threshold appeared a sudden celestial blaze of white. It was Luca Biscotti.
“Starbucks – ha! You little hypocrite.”
Misty glared at him through the steam of her mochaccino with pure hatred.
“You’re every bit as brazen a faker as I am!”
What to do? what to do? But of course, the answer couldn’t have been simpler. Misty took a careful step back, then pitched the coffee cup forward in one sharp, deadly movement, sloshing the coffee – thick, brown and irrevocably staining – all over Luca’s snow-white front.
“True,” she said.
Then, in the shocked hush which followed this act of sartorial demolition, she pushed past the slowly encroaching onlookers and swept out of the shop.
It was Friday afternoon, and the chirpy contagion that marks the end of the working week spread slowly through the headquarters of Whoremonger and Citadel, Bishopsgate, London, EC2. In the kitchens, PA’s threw the tea bags from their bosses’ tea into the bins a little more gaily. At a meeting of the Board of Directors, the more predatory members ribbed the Chief Executive over this quarter’s results with a little more heartless don’t-give-a-damnery. And down in the pristine, airless, striplit warrens of Level -2, Nigel Percival Shadley, a personage about as well-fit to the environs of Whoremonger and Citadel as the Marquis de Sade to the Last Supper, felt almost equal to the task of phoning up Mordant Grendall in Miami and asking for the name of their head of South American derivatives.
Nigel had been there for almost nine months now in the capacity of General Assistant, Temporary – a job title which, though lowly, at least had the implied virtue of variety. Yet Nigel’s work never altered from format outlined to him by Dave Staple, Whoremonger and Citadel’s Internal Resources Manager, at interview:
“See these?” said Dave, his pugilistic forefinger running smoothly down a dense list of financial institutions that decorated the inner pages of the Financial Times.
Nigel hummed obediently. He was a Poet, and opposed in principle to the whole vast corrupt edifice of modern capitalism. But he possessed enough acumen to realise that this was not the place for Revolt, however richly deserved. Not at first-interview stage, anyway.
“I want the names of everyone who manages funds in these companies,” Dave continued. “You phone ’em up. You ask.”
That, basically, was Nigel’s job description in six words. But the Baudelaire of Neasden Lane, intellectually curious if philosophically opposed, wanted more.
“Why do you require these names?”
“You heard of headhunting?”
“The practice among primitive tribes of making incursions for the purpose of procuring human heads as trophies,” said Nigel fluently.
Dave Staple’s eyes were blue and unfriendly. He would have terminated the interview there and then, but Nigel’s predecessor had smoked skunk in the staff toilets. The guy before that had helped himself to a stack of headed letter paper and used it to set up a flourishing sideline selling bogus written references over the internet to would-be business moguls from Bogota to Tashkent. Clearly, nowadays, you just couldn’t get the staff.
“Full of facts, ain’t you?” Dave sniffed. “Headhunting is one of those commercial expressions you probably didn’t have much time for on your” – he stabbed the Qualifications section of Nigel’s CV with his forefinger – “French Literature degree course.” Dave enounced the phrase with the tiniest modicum of contempt, like the pinch of salt in a recipe for chocolate cake.
“Let me explain. In today’s commercial environment, you have to be flexible. Expand or die, that’s the order of the day. Besides, why pay some big fancy agency to do basic recruitment legwork when it can be done on a flexible, low-cost basis by…well, by someone like you?”
Nigel had had a quick look at the company’s website prior to interview. In the ‘About Us’ section, phrases such as ‘creative investment solutions’ and ‘aggressive wealth maximisation strategies’ had figured large. ‘Basic recruitment legwork’ had not.
“But you’re not a recruitment firm, are you?”
“We are in as much as we give people jobs,” said Dave, slowing and simplifying his words as though talking to a toddler. “And we don’t want to give a job to someone who hasn’t got a job, ’cos they’re probably useless. (This applied to Nigel of course, but it was in neither of their interests to point the fact out.) “Likewise, nobody wants to give a job to someone who’s got a job but wants to leave – ’cos they’ve probably fucked something up. Somebody who’s already got a job, and is perfectly happy in it, is, on the other hand, perfect. They’re exactly the kind of person you want to take out of their working environment and stick into a brand new job. That’s headhunting.”
“I see. And what if they don’t like the brand new job?”
“You get nothing in this world if you’re not prepared to take a risk. And that’s where you come in, Nigel. Talent is the lifeblood of business, closely followed by a ruthless commitment to cutting costs. The wages are £5.25 an hour. You in?”
“That is actually below minimum wage.”
“How much is minimum wage?”
“£5.70 an hour.”
“OK, let’s be generous, let’s call it minimum wage.”
That was last summer, and since then, Nigel had phoned up every bank from Burmuda to Saigon asking for the names of the heads of emerging markets, the heads of European bonds, the heads of derivatives trading. Gradually, an almost unconquerable apathy had sunk in. Now one thing and one thing only kept Nigel at Whoremonger and Citadel, and it had nothing to do with headhunting. It lay amid the chaotic tangle of directories, atlases and old copies of the FT on his desk: a photocopied typescript of the Neasden Cantos.
The poem was an extended verse allegory, although what it was an allegory of, it would be a little difficult to pinpoint. Indeed, just to pose the question Nigel would have considered contemptibly naïve. In parts it was so abstruse as to make Finnegan’s Wake read like Jilly Cooper, and its intricacies had absorbed Nigel since leaving university five years before. The final word, “lambent”, had been put on paper at the end of a writers’ retreat in the Brecon Beacons, when Nigel, displeased to the point of physical nausea by the masturbatory feedback which ended each day’s work-shopping, locked himself in his room to write, emerging only to steal ice-cream from the kitchens.
The result, although not overwhelmingly long, was highly innovative in form and spacing (at one point, an entire page of the manuscript was given over to a single word – “caliginous”) and as a result ran to more than two-hundred pages. With reasonable care, he could photocopy and post this manuscript to agents in Whoremonger and Citadel’s post room, saving himself a tidy £20 in copy-shop charges and £16 in second-class postage each time he sent his meisterwerk out. When you live on minimum wage and have Literary Immortality to wrest from an unsuspecting world, such small savings add up.
“While I can assure you that those shares in Peruvian bauxite were, as I pointed out to you at the time, not for the faint-hearted, Haitian charcoal is, I can assure you, quite a different thing…” Nigel listened to Janine Crimp, the broker he shared an office with, sail the choppy waters of negative customer feedback. ‘Not for the fainthearted’ was a phrase Janine used often. Roughly translated, it meant ‘about as likely to rise in value as a canary is to overturn a car’ and seemed to apply to almost every stock Janine tried to sell. The success she enjoyed in doing so was demonstrated very amply in the fact that they had put her down in Level -2, sharing a room with Nigel.
“…Mr Wilderbeast, this is different. How could we not have your best interests at heart, Mr Wilderbeast? Here at Whoremonger and…
“He hung up! He bloody hung up!” she announced to no one in particular. “I’ll fix him!”
She tapped out the number again. “Ah, Mr Wilderbeast, it seems for some inexplicable reason we got…” Then her face darkened. A pause. She slammed down the phone. “I’m going out for a fag.”
Silence. There would be no better time than this. Janine was away from her desk; Dave Staple was locked red-faced in his office, cursing gently over a pile of invoices. Nigel pulled his manuscript out from its tangle of telephone directories and newspapers and looked over it proprietarily. The Neasden Cantos by N.P. de Shadley. (The particle was resurgent now - he had abandoned Coleridge-Forbes in the wake of his rejection by Circumference magazine.)
Yet pride mingled with anticipation that afternoon, because the manuscript had to go off in the post that day to meet the deadline for the Perambulations Poetry Prize. On the panel was Rufus Greengable, Editor of Astrolabe magazine, who in their last bout of correspondence had made positive noises about including Nigel’s prose poem, The Silken Sybaritic Fever, in some as yet unspecified issue.
It was 3.47. Nigel had precisely 103 minutes to get his manuscript in the post, to knock Greengable’s socks off, to scoop the prize. He could see Greengable now, locked in ardent critical jousting with the other, less enlightened judges, batting for Shadley, gladiating for Art, fighting for the future of English Letters. Greengable needed him. Literature needed him. It was time to act.
And yet he would need to act carefully. Dave Staple was a notorious tartar when it came to stationery policy. He had explicitly forbidden personal use of any Whoremonger facility and ranged Level - 2 like some sore-headed predator of the Savannah, enforcing this edict. So before taking the manuscript through to the post room to make a copy, Nigel hid it carefully in the midst of some spreadsheets, and kept a jumpy look-out as the photocopier whirred into life.
Then Janine Crimp, redolent of tobacco, entered in search of envelopes.
“How’s tricks?” asked Nigel, with a play at nonchalance.
“Oh, you know, that bloody Haitian charcoal, sinking like a stone again. There any DL non-window round here?”
“Second shelf down,” said Nigel with the cool assurance of the practised stationary thief.
Janine departed with her envelopes. The copier finished its task. Nigel hastily removed the sheath of copies, hot from the machine like bread from the oven. Five minutes later, the copies were in a jiffy-bag, franked, addressed, and lost inside the slouching grey mailbag destined for tonight’s post. With no time to lose, either, as Dave Staple was bearing down the corridor to the post room just as Nigel sauntered out.
Back at his desk, the Baudelaire of Neasden Lane was lost in dreams of what would come next. Greengable, of course, would read the manuscript, intrigued, grateful, finally awed. He would take up the cudgels for the Neasden Cantos, champion its Poundian austerity, its petulant refusal to dally in the Audenesque. Nigel’s poem would win. More work would follow. Poems in the TLS and the Spectator. Reprints, translations, laudatory reviews. Nigel swelled in anticipated success, luxuriated in a warm bath of prospective glory. He almost felt up to the task of phoning Mordant Grendall in Miami to ask the name of their head of South American derivatives. Then:
“Nigel!”
It was Dave Staple. His hostile blue eyes held Nigel’s. “I found this left in the photocopier tray.”
He lay a single, mortal sheet of A4 in front of Nigel. In the background, Nigel heard Janine quietly put down her phone.
He read:
The Neasden Cantos
A deconstructed verse allegory
By
“A prophet is not without honour,
save in his own country and in his
own house.” – Matthew 13:57
“This got anything to do with you?”
Need we linger too long, dear reader, over the painful scenes which followed? The brisk march into Dave Staple’s glass partitioned office, the same sheet of self-proclaiming, self-condemning paper pushed under Nigel’s nose? The talk:
“Here at Whoremonger and Citadel we run a pretty tight ship. Lean and mean more or less sums it up. Flagrant wastage of stationery cannot be condoned. Unsurprisingly, seeing as I am still getting enquiries from tossers in Tajikistan.”
“…”
“I took the liberty of examining today’s first-class post bag, Nigel. And in it was this parcel,” Dave lifted the precious manuscript, addressed in Nigel’s own hand to the Perambulations Poetry Prize. “Franked to the value of sixteen pounds seventy-six. What do you think of that?”
Never before, in eight months and sixteen days’ employment, had Dave Staple asked Nigel’s opinion on anything. Now, teetering on the brink of unemployment, the last of the Shadleys had his chance to speak. For Literature, for Civilisation, for Humanity.
“Oh, that…ha ha!” he began falteringly. “A mere trifle. A harmless boon of the job. Merely a way for me, the enterprising young executive, to further my career in innovative new ways…” Dave’s eyes narrowed at this, but he said nothing. Nigel, emboldened, went on: “And all the while burnishing Whoremonger and Citadel’s reputation as a patron of the arts, a happy keeper of the flame of beauty and truth…”
This, now, was too much.
“You’ve wasted £16.22 of Whoremonger and Citadel’s money!” Dave waved Nigel’s title page aloft. “On this shit!”
“What did you call it?” spluttered Nigel, rising to his feet. Clearly, soft-soaping was getting him nowhere. And his sword did not sleep in his hand. “How dare you, you Vulgarian? You Visigoth! After I try to reason with you, too…”
“Get out now!”
“I will not get out, Staple, you despicable slave-driver. You sit here in this vast glass temple of boorishness and rapacity…”
Dave Staple threw the manuscript, rugby football-style, hard to Nigel’s chest. “Get out and take your parcel with you.” Then without pausing Dave grabbed him by the sleeve and marched him through the open-plan areas of Level -2. This sudden manhandling, coupled with the realisation that he would never again see any of the people who now gawped unashamedly at his ignominious exit, re-awoke the fire of Nigel’s indignation.
“And as for you…you dead-eyed goons, staring glazed at computer screens that tell you nothing, nothing, except that the world is rotten and you are dying piecemeal of a kind of emotional anaemia…”
A quotation from Pound – this was getting better, thought Nigel. But then a security guard joined Dave, and after bundling him into the lift they frogmarched him across the gleaming entrance hall, through the revolving doors and out onto the streetDave Staple flung the jiffy-bagged manuscript after its author. It burst on impact with one of the steps, blizzarding Bishopsgate with the pages of Nigel’s meisterwerk.
Nigel, careless of the passers by, was on his knees, desperately trying to recover the pages and stuff them into the inside of his jacket for safety. At last, amid the wind-whipped papers which circled all around him this effort seemed so futile that he gave up, raised his fists aloft to the uncaring glass frontage of Whoremonger and Citadel and screamed:
“Bastards!”
A little later, an old woman in a tweed overcoat came up to him, proffering a single sheet of the manuscript, which began:
“Out of the corybantic wilds of frenzy, Goddess…”
“Is this yours, young man?”
“Yes.”
“You poor, poor boy.”
“Have you done any paid work in the last fourteen days?”
“I have commenced a poetical re-imagining of Milton’s Paradise Lost in vers libre.
Sharon Peggs raised her eyes from the sheaf of forms on her desk. The young man opposite her wore a paisley cravat. His eyes fizzled defiantly. He was quite possibly mad, thought Sharon, but probably not physically dangerous. Not liable, like so many others, to punch computer monitors, kick over carousels of leaflets, treat Neasden’s Job Centre Plus as the grand theatre of their mental health issues. And even if he was, there were security guards at the doors: Keith and Jermaine, their muscles straining under their ribbed pseudo-military sweaters.
“Any paid work?”
“Er…no.”
“Sign here please.” Sharon pushed the form across the desk, and Nigel embellished it with as elaborate a signature as he could devise given that the Job Centre refused to allow him to insert a “de” between first and surname. Nigel was, in fact, in a relatively mellow mood. Life, post-Whoremonger and Citadel, had turned out to be a relatively flourishing affair. Not only was work on his poetical re-imagining of Paradise Lost going well (there was a lot of Nigel in the heroic Satan; Hell had transmogrified into Bishopsgate and the tyrannical God modelled closely on Dave Staple), but a subsidiary prose poem he had dashed off on the subject of Whoremonger and Citadel and his erstwhile manager (entitled In Hell: Notes on the Mind of a Tyrant and an Imbecile) had received a positive endorsement from Rufus Greengable. “Of course, I couldn’t possibly run two of your pieces in one edition,” he had written back, “but I shall certainly keep it to hand.” The loss of income had not yet been particularly troublesome. Nigel had only the previous day received his final salary payment, and in any case he lived frugally. He spent nothing on clothes, scarcely drank, and considered most emanations of contemporary culture – books, plays, restaurants, newspapers, films, clubs, records – to be beneath his contempt. Extended leisure had allowed him more time to write, and he had extended his customary Sunday encounters with the hoodies of Gladstone Park to an afternoonly battle. Last Tuesday, surrounded by a trio of hoodlums on stolen BMXs, he had scored a decisive victory by inserting the crook end of his umbrella (carried, even on the brightest of days, as a precaution in case of actual hand-to-hand combat), into the front wheel of one of these machines, launching the rider into the mud and rendering the bike unrideable. Even his mother, who customarily nagged him without cease when he was unemployed, had discovered the wonders of internet dating, and was caught up in the grisly charms of a romance with an internal resources manager from Purley. Things, unquestionably, were going well.
“Here.” He passed the form back to Sharon Peggs.
“So, how’s your job search going?”
“My long poem the Neasden Cantos is being considered as we speak by the Trismegistmus Press. If they see fit to publish…”
“Mr Shadley, in order to qualify for Job Seeker’s Allowance, you need to be actively seeking work. And that means taking at least three concrete steps per week to get yourself back into paid employment. You should outline these steps in detail in this booklet…” She opened the depressing green document for Nigel to see.
“When I was here last, they tried typing my profession into the database, and nothing came up.”
“What is your profession, Mr Shadley?”
“Epic poet.”
“Well, perhaps you need to widen the scope of your job search a little. In today’s fast-paced, knowledge-based economy, we all need to step outside our comfort zones a little. What qualifications do you have?”
“A degree in French Literature.”
“OK,” said Sharon a little doubtfully. “Let’s try that.” She tapped a few computer keys. “French Literature, French Literature…no exact matches, I’m afraid, but we do have a vacancy with a French Windows company in Harlesden. But you would need Sales Experience. Do you have Sales Experience?”
“No.”
“And I suppose French Polishing would be out of the question?”
Nigel looked at her with unconcealed dislike.
“Not to worry,” Sharon said briskly. She pulled open a drawer of her desk and extracted a worn file. The file bore a little label in the top right-hand corner, too small to be legible to Nigel. It said: ‘Remedial’.
“How about this then – a vacancy at a catering company in the N10 area…so just a hop, skip and a jump from you.”
“What’s the job?”
“‘General Assistant, Temporary’, which – correct me if I’m wrong – was the exact same job title as you had with your last employer,” said Sharon brightly. “Talk about seamless career progression!”
“What’s the pay?”
“Oh, minimum wage. Look, here are some more details.”
It was for a company called Passionate about Pastries. They wanted someone to do ‘general duties.’ Nigel could not bring himself to read on.
“Why not give them a call?” said Sharon. “You can use my phone here.”
“What if I refuse?”
“Your job search to date Mr Shadley has hardly been exemplary. Refusal even to contact a potential employer could set the wheels in motion for your benefit to be suspended.”
“What are the hours?”
“Eight till five.”
Nigel sighed and picked up the phone.