The coffee crackled black across the tongue, provided the
lips with the necessary lacquer to expel speech. Faith looked with a mild sense
of mirth at the shrinking human being in the corner; the mirror set at an angle
so that it warped all it captured.
It was a cruel judge, she thought – the contours of the room
splintered by the single offending eye.
‘And she had always been so tidy’ – her mother’s voice wavered in her
ears like an intoxicated breath, drawing her towards the window as if she could
capture something tangible, out onto the balcony. It was only the later of
city-ash which shuffled uneasily under her feet, and she watched those flaked
remains of imperceptible time – like the rasping perspiration of some Mr Jones
running for the train, the piece of hair from the head of a Mrs Bartlett –
flicker from the edge. Like ink dropped into water, she thought, watching the
larger flakes of ash fall. A sensation she knew only too well.
The way ink shivered from the nib and split its ripe globe
to forever taint liquid, provided her with a vague amusement. She went to work,
the splintered colour of the computer face mocking her own, and would sit,
typing with an automatic hand, whilst the other would occasionally reach for
the pen and scatter ink into water. Her hands at these moments held nothing
tangible but a sense of reciprocity between them and Faith would feel a sudden
consciousness for the rest of her body, a kind of guilt. She pictured the neck
contracting into the chest, and so on, to leave only a pair of hands. Like a
Testament. Her mother used to say that too, often when they were eating – the
white bread bloated on her tongue like a gross communion wafer.
Religion: None.
The couplet mocked her as she typed it through – again and
again, each time the bile rising a little in her throat. It was a strange
position she thought – the position of ‘none’, of nothing. Could one own
nothing? Could one - be nothing?
None. Nothing. The two indulgent adjectives she had applied
to herself in the relay she referred to as life. “Nothing’s left” slipped down
the phone as she walked home one night where the streetlights injected the
puddles with a petroleum streak, “Nothing’s changed” when she watched the silhouette
of a young man dressing flicker like a
sketch still underway in front of the curtains. She remembered the press of the
lips of his speech, hot and heavy through the muffled darkness.
“You’re right.”
She remembered these bursts of speech with sudden clarity,
such individual moments parodied by the opposite office wall – a single piece
of sheet glass upon which the residue of the thoroughfare would conglomerate
and stare. Insects pulverised to a mere stain, acrid dust, the flailing arms of
a long-disembowelled plastic bag. She watched the window occasionally –
not for what was beyond it, but for
itself. That was how she would describe herself, she concluded, typing another
row, this time ‘Religion: N/A’ – a window. There were the usual idioms for
people of course – wallflower, clown, shark – but she deemed ‘window’ as
somehow applicable to herself. A window she always sat against as her
mother would face her with the
oppressive ‘o’ lips of disappointment, the voice almost empty in its dirge – ‘I
wish you would have taken the opportunity and made some friends…’. The window
was cold – a clean solid relief from the spattering cliques of the school, the
silted conglomerates of the city streets. Instrumental, but somehow lacking
intrinsic value. She felt the generative fur of the city dredge her limbs just
as much as the glass did.
Another sip of coffee, or splash of ink – alternating the
non-typing hand. Her eyes watered, anticipating the security of closed lids and
deliciously empty hours. She could be right, Faith thought, she could be right,
just as the man who flickered in the stairwell with the percussion of his
charity bucket told her. Just as the newspapers told her, just as the distorted
faces gaping from billboards with their polished lips told her.
It made a change – masticating the mediocrity. She had never
been expected to ‘be anything’ –the phrase so frequently doled like a portion
of sedative, yet utterly meaningless. She was installed with no aspiration; a
child who wrote little scraps to a waiting horde of ever-imagined readers,
drifted through school, snapped into work.
Census offices – census typist. The four words flashed against her
chest, mounted on a silver pin.
“One of the family.”
That was what the boss managed to roughly articulate,
slapping his hand on her shoulder one afternoon with a focused force which sent
waves tingling through her skin. She
disliked him. The methodical roll on the ball of his heels as he orientated his
chop-cheeked bulk through the office repulsed her a little. A cigarette
protruded like a permanent apparatus for breath between his lips; almost part
of the flesh. Flesh – be it greasy, grainy, hairy, old, young, new, alive,
dead, male, female. Another category for the Census.
Faith could not fathom how long she had worked as a Census
typist – the inexplicable series of repetitions beginning with the rolled stone
of the dawn, digging digits into the old mattress of an otherwise empty bed as
one dug fingers into a keyboard, the days dilution, the walk ‘home’ to the city
apartment which did not deserve the idiom.
The vague smell of alcohol. Food which seemed constituted based on an
idea of itself – never quite embodying anything other than the grey of tarmac.
Occupation: -
Grey. It seemed appropriate for her occupation, she mused,
pushing the aspirin under her tongue as the clock spliced itself at the
meridian – cold and unapologetic, a black clot over cool glass. Time trickled onwards in that iced liquid, a sensation
she felt slowly stirred through her veins, turning the white flesh to an
ever-present grey. The computer smiled, draining the whites of her eyes.
She often thought about the composure of words during those
long automatic hours – words with their brazen lines, crosses and hatches.
Memorials of themselves. Objects – like the ‘whites of the eyes’ being a
strange one in itself. For her eyes were rarely white, the quivering mass
suffused with the blood-bloat of over-work or
hours of agitation misunderstood as sleep. Sated a little with another
aspirin, sometime in the afternoon, she continued.
Her typing fingers
flickering over those vague corrugations like one treats the wounds of
the familiar. To her it felt like a kind of
necessary taxation of the times –
she felt she could ‘do’ little else.
The same idiom again – the same idiom she would apply her thoughts
to, thinking of what others would ‘do’ in that great assembly of existences.
She read her typing of the census like a confession – read of the retired
bankers, and rented-house shop workers, an unemployed woman with a degree she
did not seem to think appropriate to list. These characters converged in her
mind, almost communal – like the night-nurse with four children Faith envisaged
feeding the family with bread broken from the loaf and layered under butter and
jam. The 28 year old divorcee who perhaps crawled to the second bedroom in his
suburban property. The man who rattled the charity bucket and piped above the
gravelly growl of insufficient funding – ‘you’re right.’
Yes, she was, she knew them all somehow. She knew everyone.
But it was not enough.
Hours would stall by in the evenings, where the tiling felt suddenly
abrasive under the revolted insoles of her feet, and she would lie across the
bed – prominent in its slab of the days sacrifice – unable to accustom names to
any kind of face, thought of a series of occupations but for bodies without
gender, birth year after birth year…
“You were quiet even just from being born.” Her mother’s
voice again, aching over the air as she sat for another five hours in the
office, or sat up in bed against pillows which protruded markedly against her back
as if in defiance of all reassurance. The very words seemed to ring around her,
curling concentric in the glass she drank from, spirits as sheer as water which
splintered the lingering light of the city dusk. Sometimes she would pull her
face from behind her arm and look at the window, rather than through it.
It was more often now, in those hours between work, that her
thoughts fell to a certain name – an Adam Hutchinson. The syllabic structure of the name, the
imperceptible piques between the letters, seemed somehow pleasing to her. She
had recorded a few before, more than a few in fact, year in, year out. Yet now
she thought of an Adam Hutchinson with slicked-back hair and a Soho flat and
employment, as was often said, ‘on the horizon’. Such a romantic idiom, she
thought. She gave him a birth date
closer to her own, indulged over the particular way of his beliefs – perhaps he
was a type to write ‘Christianity’ out of certain kind of fear flexing across
the skin when one comes to official documents. Yes, he decided on Christianity.
Faith mused that she would most likely do the same – she mused, and mithered,
thoughts thickening to words at a spurt of her fingers.
The same - day in, day out. An inevitable conjecture –
somehow haunted, if only by itself.
A sameness in solidarity, so to speak. The same
experienced by the cook on the third
floor of the office, mechanically doling out her time and effort to the bland
mouths of repetitive faces, one grotesque communal crawl of flesh. The same
experienced by the taxi driver, threading the same city streets, his crippled
spine spared in the couched darkness. The same day in, day out, for the tax
officer – the same twisted stares of disapproval, hostility speared through
speech, old men approaching the door unassisted, only to suddenly collapse in on themselves, like
soaked board.
It was the same as tax officer William Jones dodged the
scuttling black beetles of city cars, the pressure of his shirt collar like a
disapproving finger, the thought of another tax evader heavy on his mind. Man
who made no known payments – rather scheming business, it was assumed, almost
with regret. Confrontations were not a strong point upon such low
energy. His briefcase sweated against prickling palms, providing him with some
difficulty through the narrow Soho streets.
He arrived at the flat at his intended time of mid-morning.
It was a Saturday and he attempted to ring the bell with an optimistic flick of
the wrist in the hope the occupant would be in. He could not bear a return
journey.
At his ring of the hell, the speaker system in the wall
crackled, which the tax collector had no choice
but to assume to be interrogative.
“I’m here on behalf of the tax collection ser-“
His announcement, cupped-palm round the speaker, voice
slowly expelled as if to impress, was cut hastily short by the door to the
collection of flats clicking open. The tax collector posted himself through the
ungenerous amount of door space, flicked his hair back to a somewhat greater
height with an accustomed hand and proceeded directly to the specified flat –
31 A.
The door of the flat itself hung open, emitting a greasy
kind of light as if strained through several surfaces, finally to be smeared in
a dull blur on the foyer wall, close to where the tax collector stood on the
threshold of the room.
“Good day,” he began, deciding an authoritative oratory presence
would perhaps rouse the inhabitants enough for co-operation “I’m here on behalf
of the Tax Collection Service. It has been brought to our attention that a Mr
Adam Hutchison, registered at this here address, has been evading the payment
of –“
He stopped short again at what sounded similar to the eruption
of birds wings – yet a sound also infused with a plaintive, solitary quality.
He was tired and wanted the day to end. He thought little of walking forward,
only perhaps a small amount upon the phrase itself – ‘walking forward’ – used
as an idiom by insecure parents to encourage his academic advancements in his
teenage years. Just getting it over
with.
Years. The indefinable quality of the years.
The room was an explosion of captured light, grounded only
by the rough-centrality of an unmade, iron-grey double bed and then an
inexpressible quality of the days detritus – clothes, pens, cutlery, stale
sheets, food serrated the corners by cautious mouthfuls – scattered as if
thrown from a height. A standing
dressing mirror stood impeccably straight against the back wall, almost
sentinel, as if quietly musing upon the
chaos. Open and against the exposed sheet was a large notebook, the source of
the initial noise – its shattered spine buckling beneath agitated pages which
thrashed against cruel fingers of the wind manipulating further the wide-open
window. Pages seeped with scribbling, some almost aching with the pressure
applied to the page. There was something almost infantile in those inkings, the
tax inspector mused, drawing a little closer, as if to shut the book. List
after lists of names, varying from the mundane to the ridiculous, rapidly
written career prospects, every and any abode, sequence after sequence of salaries…
And then as he was flicking through the book, the tax collector
stopped on a roughly central page.
‘Adam Hutcheson.’
A tick was flicked against the name like a sick smile, a
tick nearly the same to those which followed – Annie Price, Benjamin Simpson, Aled Peters…
Perhaps Faith had done the right thing. She had made
friends.
