The Shapeless Unease Read online

  She turns to her computer and is silent. Finally, without any eye contact, she says, This is not a shop.

  I look out of the tall sash window. A heron flaps steadily past above the canal. Rage and exhaustion are much the same sensation, I discover, a flame struggling out of the same dead fire. Anger is alive, energetic, object-oriented, but rage is what’s left, eating itself alive. Rage and exhaustion eat me alive. They eat my deference, my past up to this moment, my future beyond this moment, my shoulds and shouldn’ts.

  Now she is back-pedalling, as if she realises she has gone too far. But yes, she says (almost stammers), we’ll do the test, yes, it’s a good idea, let’s do that. As she taps something out on her keyboard, I wonder if I’m in the presence of a maniac. Or am I the maniac? She has me in a game of cat and mouse and I don’t know why. I watch the November sky, heavy and grey, and the pile drivers across the valley where new houses are being built. When I lived over there people objected to those houses; not me. I couldn’t see the point since they’d be built anyway. Rage hollows my stomach, like driving too fast over a humpback bridge. Hands on my lap, primly linked, gentle hands. Not elegant but gentle. A lifetime of courting favours and having manners and asking nicely and never minding, never minding if the answer is no.

  Radio 3; The Women of Renaissance Ferrara. It’s lovely. It’s just lovely. Those female voices in layers, he can’t tell how many. With his eyes closed he can’t imagine being anywhere but in a cathedral, even when he opens them it takes a while to believe in the sight of his kitchen.

  The sun is hot on his right hand and thigh. His kids find it funny, him listening to Radio 3. Only people who live up on Woodlands Lane listen to Radio 3, his kids say, and anyway he’s an old punk, that’s what they think. It isn’t true but let them think it, it makes him sound cooler than he is, or was. What he really liked was all those soft-metal bands that were around in the late 70s and 80s, with their ridiculous hair. He liked Rod Stewart; he’d never tell them that. And Kate Bush. His kids don’t get Kate Bush. But maybe, he thinks, maybe there’s something there in her songs that he can hear in the Women of Renaissance Ferrara, the way their voices take him somewhere else.

  He turns the radio off when the doorbell rings. He lets Mul in and Mul sits at the halfoval of the kitchen table, in the sunlight, while he makes tea.

  ‘Gail out?’ Mul asks.

  ‘She’s taken Kelly into town to get – I don’t know. Something-or-another.’

  Mul nods. His look says all kinds of things at once. It says, Well she can afford it now, the something-or-another. It says, She’s spending it already? It says, Does she know? But he knows she doesn’t know, because that was the agreement between the five of them and it’s set in stone.

  ‘Jesus it’s hot,’ Mul says. ‘Never known a summer like it.’

  ‘You and Len going fishing later?’

  ‘About three. You coming?’

  ‘Gail wants to do something together. If you’re going tomorrow I could.’

  ‘Well, we’ll see. Might do. We’ll see.’

  Mul looks older than his fifty-odd years; he looks tired, like he’d rather give it all up and fish for the rest of his life. They’ve each come away with a bit more than £13,000, which isn’t enough to give it all up but maybe Mul can have a few holidays to break up the monotony.

  Len and Paul think they should have jackpotted more than three machines, they should have done one each, but it was him, Mul and James who vetoed that. Three was enough, every one of them had scared him shitless and still does. Mul too. Mul looked almost sad when he got his £13,000, as if it made his years of work look like a mug’s game. Which it was – everything was a mug’s game, including emptying cash machines. Because you scare yourself shitless and then you’ve got your £13,000, and then what? What are you going to do with it? How do you even spend it, a brick of twenties marked with serial numbers linked to a crime? James is going to buy Bitcoin with his, and thinks they all should, but none of them know what Bitcoin is. Thirteen grand will buy you three, that’s all they know, and they’re not going to spend thirteen grand on buying three of a thing James can’t quite explain and that doesn’t exist. How are you going to spend it, then, James wants to know. You don’t, yet, that’s the thing. You hide it and spend whatever else you’ve got first.

  ‘I was thinking,’ he says to Mul. ‘You should have a couple of grand of my money. Then you can, I don’t know. Just. Have it. For whatever.’

  ‘No way,’ says Mul. ‘Nope.’

  ‘Come on. A holiday for Mary, now she’s feeling better.’

  Mul lifts his hands and lets them fall onto the table. A Vicks Inhaler falls over, the one Gail uses for her hay fever. ‘I didn’t even do anything. I just stood in a queue.’

  ‘It’s not like that.’

  He’s about to say how they were in it together, himself, Mul, Lenny, Paul and James. They were equal partners – except for James, who got £10k extra for being the brains, the technological know-how – and they all risked the same. If one of them got caught they’d all own up. He doesn’t say any of it because they’ve agreed not to talk about it now it’s done. Never to talk about it again. It’s done.

  ‘I don’t want it,’ Mul says. He raises and tilts his cup of tea slightly, which is a gesture of thanks and blunt refusal.

  Anyway, they didn’t risk the same – James risked far more, passing himself off as a technician and getting into that machine, putting the computer there. Really, James deserved a bigger cut of the money, and he feels like saying that to Mul too because it’s been bothering him. But James seems happy with what he got and happy to have taken the risk, almost as if the risk gave him more pleasure than the money will.

  Anyway it’s done, it’s done. Five days since the last one in that shopping centre and they’re by no means in the clear, and talking about it, even in your own kitchen, is asking for trouble. The doors are open, the neighbours just on the other side of that fence.

  After that they talk about nothing much. Mul always calls round on a Saturday morning for tea after he’s taken Mary to her painting group. He didn’t for a while, when Mary was ill, so now it feels less like a routine and more like a special thing, a thing to be thankful for. So when Mul leaves he gives him a sudden, almost aggressive hug, a lung-rattling slap on the back, and he feels Mul’s hand pressed against the back of his head, like someone would if they were going to push your head violently down – but without the push. With a firm clenching of the fingers, really briefly, a sort of weird, awkward comfort.

  /

  He doesn’t feel the same as Mul. To him, the money is a godsend. He knows exactly what he’ll do with it. He’ll give it to Gail – a twenty here, a tenner there – for the rest of his life. Their kids are already provided for, all sorted out in wills, but he’s never been able to give Gail as much as he’d like. As much as she’d like, says Mul in his head. Same thing. What she wants is what he wants. The two things have been identical since the day he first saw her.

  He’s never been good with women; in general he has no idea what they want. But with Gail it’s easy; she wants the things you can buy with money. Money is love. He can do that. She doesn’t want things that other women want, like assurances and time and poetry and sixth sense, some premonition of what it is that’s needed in any given moment. He knows what she needs and he gives it, and she gives what he needs in return.

  Today he gave her a few twenties before she went out the door, without Kelly seeing. Twenties from his own bank account, now he can afford it, not from the stash, which James says isn’t safe to put into circulation yet. Spend it on yourself, he said. That look. Of delight, of gratitude and love, of having what you want. That was the look the kids used to have when they were small and were opening their presents, and it cracked his heart open so wide that it’s never gone back to being closed again. And it was the feeling he had when the machine was spewing out money, which is what made it feel right – that what he got from givi
ng her the money, and what she got from getting it, were the same thing.

  That machine in the shopping centre gave them £18,000 in five minutes. It wasn’t James putting the brakes on, he emptied it. It was as much as he earned in a year, and it still didn’t come near what the last machine gave them. They’d been lucky, they’d picked their machines well and at the right time of day. In any case he thinks it’s lucky; James thinks it was all about good planning and guile, but a life has enough failed plans – some of them great ones – to know that luck has the final say. The fact that James has sailed through to his mid-forties without finding that out is all the proof you need. Luck is everything.

  He can’t believe he did it. He just can’t believe it. And it’s that disbelief that makes it all right and gives him an unrealistic calm about what could happen next if they’re found out – because honestly some part of him believes he didn’t do it. Then, when the other part of him steps in and reminds him he did, he can say the mantra to himself: victimless crime. You’re not really a criminal if the crime is victimless. You’re an opportunist, no different to an entrepreneur, James says. You’re an opportunist.

  More than anything, he wants to tell Gail – it’s the kind of news story she would tell him. Eighteen thousand in five minutes, she’d say. Eighteen thousand. In fact he’s been half expecting that she will tell him. She’ll read about it in their local paper or something, he’s thought.

  He’s avoided the paper, the news, all of it; James said he’d keep an eye and let them know if there seemed to be any trail, anything to worry about. So far it’s been reported like the other ones, but there’s nothing the police have on them. And the police – says James – might give the outward impression of caring but they’re not going to waste their resources on catching bank robbers. Nobody likes banks. Victimless crime.

  Except, what he wanted to tell Mul today and couldn’t, was that at some point that morning, in the shopping centre, he lost his wedding ring. It’s always been on the small side and his fingers had swollen a bit that morning in the heat so he took it off, and he put it in his wallet. All that messing with his wallet at the machine, and the pretence of trying to find his card – it must have fallen out then. When he’d left the shopping centre he’d gone to put it back on, it was because of feeling elated, and wanting to connect that feeling to Gail. And it wasn’t there.

  He can’t tell the others, even though he should – if it’s been found near the machine, covered in his DNA or whatever, surely it’s game over? But aside from that, there’s something else about its loss that distresses him, makes him feel small, or that he’s failed. That ring is the one thing Gail has ever bought him – it’s cheap, but it used up all her money at the time. What a joke, to have made £18,000 in five minutes, only to lose the one thing he really valued. He can’t tell Gail. He’s scared to for some reason. Because she’s scary, Mul says. But she’s not, she’s just someone who’s gone without, that’s all. Losing money and things, or lack of money and things, terrifies her, upsets her, that’s all.

  But what can he do? He can hardly go to the lost property place at the shopping centre and say, I was just robbing the cash machine last week and I lost my wedding ring. He can’t even go back to the shopping centre itself, or near it. For now anyway – maybe ever.

  Proliferations of love. A phrase he heard earlier on Radio 3. He wasn’t really listening, he never listens to the chat between songs. Not songs. Pieces. Symphonies. Whatever. He was sitting at the kitchen table after Gail and Kelly had gone out, and he was thinking of his mother polishing her silver candelabra. It was all she had of her old life, before she married his dad. It was out of place in that little council house.

  He was thinking of that when they said something about proliferations of love on the radio, and the phrase caught him. He saw silver light everywhere for a second, maybe the fusing of the image of the candelabra and the phrase, which didn’t make much sense to him but had a feeling, like music. It felt like Gail was somewhere in that silver light, an outline of her in her wedding dress.

  Then the singing had started, The Women of Renaissance Ferrara, and he’d gone into that reverie, thinking he was in a cathedral. He was never usually a daydreamer. In the end the doorbell had rung and he’d had to shake his head before standing up and letting Mul in.

  5 a.m.:

  The collecting tide of the night gathers itself up into a wave. Can’t do it, can’t do it, can’t cope, can’t go on. Too many nights awake, too much darkness and loneliness, can’t do it. Am downstairs without knowing it, pacing, lunatic, shaking, tugging at hair, wheeling about in search of true north. My true north appears in the living room, shocked and sleepy, takes my wrists in his hands, Sshh, it’s all right, it’s OK, everything is OK, it’s all right. Wishing to scream, finding myself screaming. ‘No’ the only word the brain seems to remember,

  no to everything,

  no.

  The next day, listless, sore-eyed, sofa-bound, panic moving through me in slow, low waves. He says, And now I shall perform for you my famous Flamingo Dance.

  Then begins an awkward strutting, one arm aloft, one behind, the shoulders dipping, knees bending, this odd willowy form moving across my field of vision and back again. You are absurd, I say. Something dark and demoralised in me doesn’t want to be amused, and yet there it is, a bubble of mirth finding its way up through the murk of my innards, bursting quietly into laughter.

  My self is a self understood through fragments. My self is a scattered thing. I look in the mirror and I don’t know myself much. I look at what I write and it’s like being introduced to my soul. Every time for the first time, not always liking what I see.

  I know myself in ciphers. I know I am bothered and fascinated by that candelabra of my mother’s because it found its way into this book and then it found its way into a story within this book. I hadn’t thought of that candelabra for thirty years; then I thought of the song ‘The Windmills of Your Mind’ and I saw it as if the two things came together, when in reality they might never have belonged together. Then this nameless bank robbery man who I just made up is suddenly sad about it, about my mother’s candelabra. I know that when I loan a character I made up a piece of my own autobiography I am trying to understand that piece of autobiography, and maybe they will interpret it for me and maybe they won’t. Do I understand it now? No. It doesn’t come that easily. Writing is dreaming. Not all dreams can be interpreted, and anyway, not all interpretations are right. And anyway, not all interpretations are interesting. And anyway, the dream is the thing unto itself.

  Writing is dreaming. I only discovered that a couple of years ago. It is lucid dreaming – the work of the subconscious that has a toe in the conscious, just enough to harness the dream’s waywardness. I always heard it said that writing draws on the subconscious, but that isn’t true. It is the subconscious, and it draws on the conscious.

  In the dream the subconscious finds ways to articulate, dramatise, embody things that have happened in waking life, things that are weighing on us, feelings, fears and desires. The dream is startlingly creative and expressive in doing this; it never fumbles for a metaphor, it never struggles for detail, it never labours over the unnecessary. It realises the ineffable. I dream relatively often that I’m swimming in a pool that contains only an inch of water. Even when I realise it has only an inch of water – a realisation that takes longer than it reasonably should – I carry on swimming. When I capture the feeling of this dream it is something intimately known to me – a complex but specific compression of many feelings that I can’t articulate, something to do with futility, despair, tenacity, and which no other metaphor could capture as perfectly. If I were writing and I were looking for a metaphor for that exact admixture of those exact feelings in those proportions, I would seize upon that metaphor and be glad of it.

  So it is. Some days I write, and what I write comes straight up and out of the subconscious without the conscious mind’s interference. All that sed
iment, some of it gold or gold-ish, pours through words.

  My mind is a cacophony. It thinks useful thoughts, and for every useful thought it thinks another four hundred useless, repetitive ones, and of those useless, repetitive ones a significant number are toxic. Shoulds and shoudn’ts. Eviscerations of self. Eviscerations of others. Terrors. Regrets. Reprimands. Old arguments. All of it arrives to me as an unedited babble, a firework continually exploding and dissipating, exploding and dissipating. Unedited, unreadable and impossible to assimilate. Just this constant crackling and sparking and exploding of mind.

  If the mind is a cacophony, the subconscious is silent theatre; here are the players from the conscious mind, the fears, the desires, the ought and ought-not, but they are whittled down to a core cast and they re-emerge in costume. They come with colour, substance, emotion, tone and musculature; they come as ciphers, symbols and distortions all pointing towards the essence of what I am, whatever that is. Whatever that is.

  Shoulds and shoudn’ts. Eviscerations of self and judgement and fear and anger and regrets. The mind is a tyrant; telling you what you ought and ought not to have done, which is never what you did or didn’t do. The mind is a ninja. None of this matters when I write because there are no oughts or ought-nots and there isn’t even much of a self. There seems to be a locus of awareness, there seem to be hands feeling their way across a small landscape of letters which, quite mysteriously, harness what happens in that ghostly awareness.

  Writing has saved my life. In the last year, writing has been the next best thing to sleep. Sometimes a better thing than sleep. I am sane when I write, my nerves settle. I am sane, sane. I become happy. Nothing else matters when I write, even if what I write turns out to be bad. I proceed from some open and elusive subconscious formlessness roughly called ‘me’, definable only by being nothing and nowhere, just the silence in which shapes move. Then words. Words harnessing things. There is the comfort of organisation, of shepherding chaos, not trying to abolish it but shepherding it towards borders, taking away the problem of infinity and entropy. Proffering the illusion of completeness. And somehow, I start to see myself out there in the words I’ve made, out in their many worlds, scattered and free.