Frank and Sal slouch opposite me like clothed and languid skeletons in a haze of cigarette smoke. They’re coming to the end of a bottle of poison just as I’m coming to the end of my second read-through of McCarthy’s The Crossing. To my right, Eleanor stands with her arms on the window sill, chin resting on the backs of her hands. She’s staring down into the court and in the light from outside her face is a brilliant white, its features almost invisible.
I catch Frank’s eyes, his small and watery and red-rimmed eyes through the smoke and he says ‘Fuck yeh lookin at, lad?’
‘No one. I’m reading.’
Sal croaks and leans against Frank and sputters, ‘Leave me alone I am reading.’
I sigh and allow myself to slip lower in the threadbare confines of the chair and raise the book to a height that covers my face. Covers Frank and Sal. They’re corpses lying with their eyes open to the rain and ambulance lights, and the book is a drape, the coat of an onlooker, and I’m covering their faces because the eyes of the dead see everything and nothing. They embarrass us in their blindness.
The lounge door bangs open. Vincent and Griffin, o twin pillars of solidarity, fill the view of the hall where the grey and peeling paint is bathed in surgical light. The gardener looks down at the coffee table like he looks at his cabbage patch and begins to clear it of its debris. Huge chestnut hands carefully picking the cigarette butts and crushed cider cans, dropping them in a plastic bag. Behind him Griffin stands running fingers though his beard. Then he grunts and leans across Vincent and with an ape-like arm wipes the table free of its litter.
The gardener clears his throat and produces the rolled up map of the high rise complex.
It’s the Monday sweep day and I have to look at least half interested. The map doesn’t convey contour or form. Just a series of numbers, most circled but some not, running in three parallel columns that represent the high rises.
Vincent’s talking about gutting a corridor of rooms in the West Tower. Pointing to the last remaining cluster of numbers without circles. He talks about the need for painkillers and anti-bacterial spray and all the usual household chaff. Items we can use. Items we need. Items he wants. But all I can think of is my now diminished pile of novels and the potential for literary starvation. I’ve read all the worthwhile books a couple of times over. Mostly supermarket best-sellers and cheap erotica. I suppose there weren’t many readers in the high rises. Before the lights and the thunder. The silence. Dust. Before it became our barbican.
