Armadillo

Chapter 12

‘He’s a bit peaky,’ Monika said. ‘He wouldn’t get out of his bed, Monday, wouldn’t budge. So I knew he wasn’t feeling so sunny.’
She and Lorimer were standing in the corridor just outside his father’s room, their voices low, like consultants in a ward. Lorimer shivered: the house felt cold. Outside, the day was raw and freezing, the snow still lying, hard and blue with ice.
‘Place is freezing, Monika,’ he said. ‘Something wrong with the central heating?’
‘It comes on about six. It’s on a timer.’
‘Change the timer. It’s ridiculous to be this cold. Think of Dad.’
‘Can’t change the timer, Milo. Anyway, Dad’s nice and warm in bed with an electric blanket.’
‘Fine,’ Lorimer said. ‘Can I see him?’
Monika swung the door open to let him in. ‘Don’t be too long,’ she said. ‘I want to go shopping.’
Lorimer closed the door softly behind him. The room was small and narrow, large enough for a single bed, a bedside table, a television set and a small armchair. Opposite the bed on the wall was a cluster of cheaply framed portraits of the Blocj family – grandmother, mother, the children at various ages, Slobodan, Monika, Komelia, Drava. And baby Milomre, last born.
His father’s blue eyes swivelled towards him as he edged up to the bed and drew up the armchair.
‘Hi, Dad, it’s me,’ he said. ‘Not feeling so good, eh? What’s wrong, then? Bit of a virus, maybe. Miserable weather out there. Nice warm bed’s the place to be. You get yourself well…’ he went on in this vein of banal prattle for a while as his mother and sisters had instructed him, insisting everything was understood. But it was not evident: his father’s faint smile remained his constant, unvarying response to the world, but at least his eyes were on him today, blinking regularly. He reached over and took his right hand, which was resting on the coverlet over his chest, placed there, doubtless, by Monika, always neat, always wanting things ‘just so’, including the invalid’s posture. He could not understand his father’s condition: he was not paralysed, he was simply very still. He could walk, he could move his limbs with gentle encouragement, but if not encouraged he would remain almost perfectly inert. On the surface anyway: inside all worked as normal, he supposed, pumping, oxygenating, sluicing, filtering, excreting, and so on. But the exterior man made a sloth look agitated and nervy. Maybe he was in a state of permanent hibernation, like a python coiled in a rock fissure or a polar bear in its ice cave? He assumed there was a medical term for it, some kind of ‘vegetative state’. He would rather compare his father to a sleeping bear than a vegetable.
‘That’s it, Dad, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘You’ve just had enough so you’ve switched everything off. You’re not a carrot or a potato.’ He squeezed his father’s hand and felt, he thought, a small answering squeeze in reply. His father’s hand was dry and smooth, callus-free, the nails clipped and polished, the back dappled with liver spots. It was a good hand to hold.
‘Got to get well, Dad,’ he said, a sudden catch in his voice as the prospect of his father’s death confronted him, like a ghost or a wraith materializing in the room, and he felt the tear-sting in his eyes. He realized that he was frightened of being in a world that did not contain Bogdan Blocj, even a Bogdan Blocj as reduced as this.
To dispel this melancholy mood he irritated himself by recalling his near-unendurable evenings spent in the company of Torquil Helvoir-Jayne, his new best friend. He seemed to do little else but minister to him in various ways: tidying up his routine messes, replenishing the provisions he consumed (three bottles of whisky, thus far) and listening uncomplainingly to his litany of whinges, moans and expressions of self-pity. He had also become the unwilling auditor of the Helvoir-Jayne life story – a terminally bored Boswell to Torquil’s indefatigable Dr Johnson – as Torquil sifted repeatedly through his past looking for the causes of the world’s unfairness to him, trying to analyse what had happened and why his life and career were in such appalling shape. Lorimer had heard endlessly about the distant elderly parents, his miserable decade at boarding school, his aborted attempts to become a soldier, two years as a subaltern in an unfashionable regiment, his reluctant entry into the insurance world, his assorted girlfriends, his courtship and marriage of Binnie, her ghastly parents and brothers, her intransigence, his modest, unexceptional failings and his dreams of a new brighter future.
‘It’s in the East,’ he said to Lorimer, meaning his future. ‘Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, the Czech Republic. That’s your new frontier.’ This was the only advice forthcoming from the many phone calls to his chums, his pals in the City. ‘If I could only get some capital together. I could buy an office block in Budapest, a supermarket in Sofia, a motorway service station in Moravia. Dirt cheap. Apparently people – Brits, like you and me – are making a fortune out there. Tons of money, cleaning up.’ The ache of his frustration was almost heartrending. Lorimer suggested an immediate reconnaissance. ‘But I’m broke, Lorimer, I’m skint, without moolah. I’m in debt up to my eyeballs.’ And then the shining aspirations would be replaced by the now familiar plaints: bastard lawyers, bitch-from-hell Binnie, devil incarnate Hogg, venal, selfish so-called friends who didn’t come through when you needed them (‘present company excepted, of course’). He would list them: the Rorys, the Simons, the Hughies, and some American entrepreneur to whom he had once rendered a crucial service called Sam M. Goodforth and whose name he repeated like a mantra, ‘Goodforth, Goodforth, where’s Sam bloody Goodforth now?’ When the level in the whisky bottle dipped below half way Lorimer usually took himself off to bed, where he would lie awake thinking about Flavia Malinverno and listen to Torquil making telephone calls and endlessly switching channels on the television.
Flavia had not yet phoned, some two days after their unforgettable lunch. ‘Bye, Lorimer, I’ll call you,’ she had shouted back at him through the slackening snow. If he shut his eyes he could hear the pitch of her voice exactly, see her tall figure slipping round the corner –’
‘What’re you holding his hand for? ‘Drava said, silently entering the room.
‘I thought it might be comforting,’ he said. It comforts me, anyway, he thought.
‘It’s plain morbid, that is,’ Drava said with a shudder, retrieving her father’s hand and replacing it on the counterpane.
In the hall the pungent smell of cooking meat was suddenly dominant and he could hear his grandmother and mother banging around in the kitchen, laughing and chattering in their language. Little Mercy was watching a boomingly violent video in the sitting room. A semi-audible layer of music issued from somewhere.
‘Hey, Milo,’ his grandmother shouted lustily at him. ‘Stay for lunch. We got pig. Lovely boiled pork.’
That was the smell. He made it as far as the kitchen door and paused there – any further and he would dry-heave. He breathed shallowly through his mouth. His mother was making dumplings, rolling balls of dough between her palms and popping them in a pan of hissing fat.
‘When’s the doctor coming?’ he said.
‘Tonight, I think, six o’clock.’
‘You think? He must come, insist. Make sure Dad gets the best of everything. All the tests, I’ll pay’
‘Oh, he’s fine, just a bit poorly.’
‘Stay for lunch, Milo,’ Komelia said coming up behind him and poking him in the ribs, ‘Skinny. You need some lovely boiled pork.’
‘And dumplings,’ Mercy said, skipping out of the sitting room. ‘Dumplings! Dumplings! Dumplings!’
‘Isn’t she clever?’ his mother said. ‘Plenty dumplings for you, darling. When you going to give me some more clever grandchildren, Milo?’
He saw Drava emerge from his father’s room with a chamber pot and realized it was time to go.
‘I’ve got a meeting,’ he said weakly. ‘Where’s Slobodan?’
‘Where d’you think,’ Komelia said with a sneer. ‘The Clarence.’
The Clarence, the Duke of Clarence, to give the pub its full name, was a couple of hundred yards away down the Dawes Road. Lorimer carefully picked his way through the frozen snow, Clarenceward, his condensing breath snatched from him by the numbing wind, the light threatening and baleful to the north. It was only lunchtime but it seemed night was coming on already.
The problem with the Clarence, Lorimer thought, was its utter absence of charm, its unequivocal charmlessness – which might have done duty as a form of charm, in this the day and age of the themed pub – but not even the most nostalgic drinker, Lorimer thought, could summon up much affection for this sorry watering hole. It boasted every pub minus-point, ancient and modern: a meagre choice of fizzy beers, muzak, no edible food, many clattering, flashing and pinging gaming machines, an adhesive, patterned carpet, satellite TV, a smelly old dog, surly old regulars, drunk young regulars, minimal heating, laboratory-bright lighting – and it was his brother’s local, Slobodan’s pub of choice.
Lorimer pushed open the swing doors to be assailed by the reek of a million extinguished cigarettes and two decades of spilt beer. An old man seemed to have passed out behind a table in the corner, his mouth wide open, his greasy trilby slipping off his head. Perhaps he’d just decided to die, Lorimer wondered, the Clarence could have that effect on you, as if they dosed their carbonated beer with additional Weltschmerz.
Slobodan and Phil Beazley were at the bar, where a young barman with walrus whiskers and a chain collar tattooed round his neck washed glasses in a sink of turbid grey water.
‘Milo, my main man,’ Beazley said for possibly the thousandth time.
‘Here, Kev, this is my little bro. He’s a millionaire.’
‘G’day, mate,’ said Kev, unimpressed and indubitably Australian. Lorimer wondered what had brought him all this way, from his hot, sun-filled country, across hemispheres, oceans and continents to wind up behind the bar of the Clarence, in Fulham. He also realized that the ostentatious mention of his alleged wealth was Slobodan’s code for ‘Don’t ask for your money back.’ He had in fact been planning a vague inquiry about the return of his loan as the morning’s mail had brought a note from Ivan Algomir, complaining about an ‘importunate and untimely demand from the Revenue’ and wondering when he could cash Lorimer’s cheque. Which reminded him: he would have to chase up that Gale-Harlequin bonus, everything was becoming a little stretched.
‘What’s your poison, Milo?’ Beazley asked.
‘Mineral –’ He changed his mind, the only water in the Clarence flowed from a tap. ‘Pint of Speyhawk.’
Speyhawk Special Strength Lager, designed to make a long afternoon slip by. Lorimer brought the foaming tankard to his lips, gulped and felt his brain yield. Beazley and Slobodan were drinking double gins and Coke. Lorimer insisted on paying for the round.
‘Dad’s… not well,’ Lorimer burped. He hicked and coughed. Strong stuff.
‘He’ll be fine.’
‘Constitution of a yak,’ Beazley said, and for some reason punched Lorimer in the upper arm, unnecessarily hard. ‘Hey, Milo, good to see ya.’
‘How’s business?’ Lorimer asked.
‘Diabolical,’ Slobodan said, his face going long. ‘You know old Nick and young Nick?’
Father and son, drivers at B and B. ‘Yeah. What about them?’
‘They got nicked.’
‘What for?’
‘Selling drugs down Earls Court station. ‘Parently they got a field of marijuana at their place in Tonbridge. An acre and a half
‘So,’ Beazley said, disgustedly, ‘we’re two drivers down. I’d like to root my boot up old Nick’s tradesman’s entrance, I can tell you. We’re going mental, aren’t we, Lobby?’
Lobby agreed, vehemently, mental wasn’t in it.
The glimmerings of an idea, a dangerous idea, a Speyhawk idea, began to take shape in Lorimer’s mind.
‘Listen, Phil,’ he began. ‘There’s a guy been giving me a bit of bother. If I wanted, you know, to put the frighteners on him, do you think, you know, you could give him a word in the ear?’
‘You want him sorted.’
‘Warned off.’
‘Well, we do owe you a favour, don’t we, Lobbs?’
‘What’s he done?’ Slobodan asked, genuinely curious.
‘He blowtorched my car.’
‘Not seen that in ages,’ Beazley said. ‘Very time-consuming.’
‘What’s he drive?’ Slobodan asked.
‘BMW. Big one, new model.’
‘I know what you’re thinking, Lobby,’ Beazley said with real excitement. ‘An eye for an eye, a motor for a motor.’ He leaned towards Lorimer, confidentially. ‘Lobby and me goes round to this guy, right? We got a couple of scaffolding poles – bash, wallop – we’re out of there – one seriously f*cked-up Beemer. Doddle.’
‘Doddle,’ Slobodan agreed. ‘You tell us when, chief.’
Lorimer said he would and wrote down Rintoul’s particulars, feeling a little nervous at what he might unleash but reassuring himself that his action was purely precautionary and that he was only following Hogg’s instructions. ‘Arrange your own oiling,’ Hogg had said, in so many words. So, if Rintoul started playing silly buggers he’d have to deal with Beazley and Blo?j, the enforcers, with their scaffolding poles.
He took another sip of his effervescing Speyhawk, feeling the alcohol surge almost immediately through his veins. He set the glass down, shook his brother’s and Beazley’s hands, nodded to Kev and walked carefully out of the terrible pub seeing, as he did so, reflected in a foxed mirror by the door, Phil Beazley avidly lean across the bar to claim his undrunk lager.
Outside the light was purple, like a bruise, and the air stung with ice crystals. He strode off to find his carbonized car, slipping the weight of the Clarence’s melancholia from his shoulders like an unwanted rucksack.
Unfortunately Lorimer found a parking space not far from Marlobe’s flower shack.
‘What kind of car’s that, then? ‘Marlobe asked. His stall was colourfully ablaze with many varieties of carnation.
‘Fire damage. Vandals, I think.’
‘I’d castrate them,’ Marlobe said, reasonably. ‘I’d castrate them and then I’d cut their right hands off. Wouldn’t do much vandalizing after that. Fancy a nice bunch of carnations?’
Lorimer’s loathing of carnations had not abated so he bought a bunch of ten daffodils, their buds tightly closed, breathtakingly overpriced.
‘There’s two men in a Roller sitting outside your house. Been there for hours.’
It wasn’t a Roller, it was a Maserati-Daimler or a Rolls-Bentley or a Bentley-Ferrari – one of the limited edition de-luxe hybrids that set you back somewhere in the region of ￡200,000 – certainly it was the priciest motor vehicle ever to grace the tarmacadam of Lupus Crescent. Sitting at the wheel was fat Terry, David Watts’s factotum/gofer/major domo.
‘Hi,’ Terry said, ever genial. ‘David would like a word with you.’
The smoked glass rear window on his side hummed downwards to reveal David Watts in a Wolverhampton Wanderers track suit sitting on cream calfskin.
‘Can I have a word, Mr Black?’
‘Do you want to come in?’
Watts stood in Lorimer’s flat looking about him as if he were contemplating an exhibit in the Museum of Mankind.
‘Sorry about the mess,’ Lorimer said, collecting aluminium receptacles, scooping up a shirt and a pair of boxer shorts. ‘I’ve got a friend staying.’ He stuffed receptacles, shirt, boxers and the daffodils in the swing bin – what was the point? Something blackened and crusty had dribbled down the front of his cooker.
‘That’s nice,’ Watts said, pointing. ‘Is it real?’
‘It’s Greek, about three thousand years old. Do you want me to draw the curtains?’
Watts had put on a pair of sunglasses.
‘No thanks. You’ve got a ton of CDs. Not as many as me, but you’ve got a lot.’
‘I’m sorry I haven’t got back to you, but there’s still a process of consultation to–’
‘Don’t worry about the insurance. Take your time. No, it was that group you mentioned, Achimota. Sheer Achimota.’
‘Kwame Akinlaye and the Achimota Rhythm Boys.’
‘That’s the one. Do you believe in serendipity, Mr Black?’
‘Not really’ He believed in its opposite, whatever that was.
‘It’s the most powerful force in anyone’s life. It is in mine. I have to find that CD you mentioned. Sheer Achimota. I know it’s going to be very important to me.’
‘It’s an import. I got the CD mail order. There’s a shop in Camden –’
Irina came out of the bedroom wearing one of Lorimer’s shirts.
‘Hello, Lorimer,’ she said and went into the kitchen.
‘I’m not interrupting, am I?’ Watts asked, politely.
‘What? No. Um. I just–’
‘That girl’s got the whitest legs I’ve seen. Is there any way at all I could buy that C D off you? Name your price. ￡200.’
‘I can lend it to you.’ He could hear cupboards being opened and shut in the kitchen.
‘Lend?’ Watts said, as if the concept was a new one.
‘Could you just give me a second,’ Lorimer said. ‘Excuse me.’
Torquil was lying in his bed, propped on pillows, naked and reading, as far as Lorimer could see, a soft-porn men’s magazine. Happily the sheet was bunched at his groin, between his spread legs.
‘Oh, hi, Lorimer, guess who’s here.’
‘I just saw her. Just what the f*ck do you mean by this, Torquil?’
‘Jesus Christ, what was I meant to do?’
Irina returned with a bottle of white wine and two glasses. She sat on the edge of the bed, her legs demurely crossed, and poured a drink for Torquil, who was now sprawling across the mattress, bare-arsed, searching his trouser pockets for cigarettes. In an antique display of chivalry he lit two simultaneously and handed one to Irina.
‘Lorimer?’ Irina said, blowing smoke out of the side of her mouth.
‘Yes?’
‘Man in room. Is he David Watts?’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’ believe I am in house, same house with David Watts.’ She started speaking excitedly in Russian. Her legs were indeed amazingly white, Lorimer noticed, and long and thin, the blue veins in her thighs like… He thought for a second, like rivers beneath pack-ice seen from the air.
‘Not David Watts the singer?’ Torquil said, equally impressed. ‘In this flat?’
‘Yes. I’m lending him a CD.’
‘F*ck off.’
‘You f*ck off.’
‘Lying bastard.’
‘Come and see for yourself.’
Lorimer rejoined Watts, who was now crouched in front of the custom-built shelves containing his CD collection, his sunglasses pushed up on his forehead. He had already found Kwame Akinlaye – Lorimer shelved his CDs alphabetically and under country of origin.
‘Got a lot of classical,’ Watts observed. ‘Masses of Brazil.’
‘I used only to listen to Central and South American music,’ Lorimer told him. ‘I moved on to Africa about three years ago. Started at Morocco and worked south, around the bulge, you know.’
Watts frowned at him. ‘Interesting. Where are you now?’
‘Ghana. Moving on to Benin. Next week probably.’
‘This is what you call authentic, is it?’
‘Compared to the crap we produce in the West.’
A hastily dressed Irina and Torquil arrived and Lorimer introduced them. Torquil pointed at Watts’ track suit and sang, ‘Come on, you Woo-oolves’. Irina asked for an autograph and so did Torquil, for a person named ‘Amy’. Lorimer realized with something of a shock that this was Torquil’s fourteen-year-old daughter (away at boarding school) – he trusted she wouldn’t ask her father how he came by David Watts’s signature.
‘I hope I wasn’t interrupting anything,’ Watts said, signing his name on two leaves of writing paper. ‘Love in the afternoon, sort of thing.’
‘No, no, we’d finished,’ Torquil said. ‘In fact, you’ve got to be going, haven’t you, Irina? Got to go, yes? Go?’
‘What? Oh, yes, I must go.’ She collected her handbag, said shy goodbyes (Lorimer noticing there was no further physical contact between her and Torquil) and left. Watts accepted one of Torquil’s cigarettes.
‘I’m amazed she knew who you were,’ Torquil said. ‘Irina, I mean. She’s Russian, you see.’
‘Everybody in Russia knows David Watts,’ said David Watts. ‘Sell millions there. Millions.’
‘Really? Tell me, is the Team ever going to get back together?’
‘Over my dead body, mate. They’re thieves, robbers. I’d rather bite my tongue off. I’d rather rip out my windpipe with my bare hands.’
‘Not what you’d call an amicable parting of the ways, then? What’s happened to Tony Anthony?’
Watts did not stay much longer, he seemed troubled by Torquil’s rehashing of the former band’s past history. Lorimer lent him a couple more CDs – a singer from Guinea-Bissau and a predominantly brass band from Sierra Leone. He said he would record them and have Terry drop them back the next day and then asked politely, as if he were a dowager or a maiden aunt, if Lorimer could walk him to his car. Terry saw them coming and heaved himself out of the driver’s seat to open the door.
‘This insurance hassle,’ Watts said, flicking away the butt of his cigarette. ‘I’ve been talking to my people and I think there’s going to be the mother of all law suits if it isn’t paid. Twenty, thirty million.’
‘Fine,’ Lorimer said. ‘We like these matters aired in court.’ That should please Hogg, he was thinking, dolefully.
‘Nothing personal,’ Watts said, ‘but it just doesn’t look good, David Watts being jerked off by a bunch of suits. It doesn’t look cool.’
‘Whatever.’
‘I’ll get these discs back to you tomorrow, mate,’ Watts said stooping into his car. ‘Much obliged, Lorimer – can I call you Lorimer? Could be fruitful. Serendipity. Be in touch.’
The car moved off soundlessly, it seemed, on its wide tyres. People in the street stopped to marvel at it. Lorimer remembered from a recent survey in a Sunday newspaper that David Watts was the 349th richest person in the country.
Lady Haigh was waiting for him in the hall. She was smartly dressed in a green tweed suit, wearing a turban skewered with a ruby-tipped hat pin. Jupiter peered out at him, panting evenly, from behind her legs.
‘Your friend brought a girl back with him this morning.’
‘I can only apologize, Lady Haigh.’
‘He makes a terrible din, clumping around all hours of the day and night.’
‘I’ll tell him to keep quiet.’
‘I find him very uncouth, Lorimer.’
‘So do I, Lady Haigh, so do I.’
389. Serendipity. From Serendip, a former name of Ceylon, now Sri Lanka. A word coined by Horace Walpole, who had invented it based on a folktale, whose heroes were always making discoveries of things they were not in quest of. Ergo: serendipity, the faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident.
So what is the opposite of Serendip, a southern land of spice and warmth, lush greenery and hummingbirds, sea-washed, sun-basted? Think of another world in the far north, barren, ice-bound, cold, a world of flint and stone. Call it Zembla. Ergo: zemblanity, the opposite of serendipity, the faculty of making unhappy, unlucky and expected discoveries by design. Serendipity and zemblanity: the twin poles of the axis around which we revolve.
The Book of Transfiguration
That evening Torquil told him eagerly and in some detail what he and Irina had done in Lorimer’s bed (sheets already off to the launderette). They watched a violent sci-fi thriller on a cable channel (Torquil’s choice) before Torquil called out for pizza and chips. Torquil smoked a pack of cigarettes and finished the whisky before he became maudlin – Oh Binnie, Binnie, Binnie’ – and then angry inveighing against Oliver Rollo in particular. Binnie had been invited to Oliver and Potts’s wedding but not Torquil – it was a vivid indication of his pariah status and Lorimer could see that it hurt. He started talking fondly of South Africa, Eastern Europe seemingly no longer on the fortune-making agenda. ‘If I could just get some capital together, Lorimer,’ he moaned frus-tratedly. ‘It’s like the old days out there, Happy Valley, Pioneer Spirit, gin and polo… All you need to do is buy a golf course or a vineyard. Money’s pouring in. But you’ve got to have something to sell – a game reserve, a marina. Brits – people like you and me – are making staggering sums of money in South Africa. Obscene amounts.’
‘Why don’t you have a snoop around? Fly out. Pick up a bargain?’ Lorimer encouraged.
‘Oh sure. I’ve got to pay that hard-hearted bitch fifteen hundred quid tomorrow and I possess exactly –’ he emptied his pockets on the table – ‘seventeen pounds and some change. This isn’t a pound coin, it’s a hundred f*cking pesetas. Sixteen pounds, some change and a hundred pesetas.’
Lorimer felt despair grip him as Torquil ran through all the possible retail outlets he had visited and that could have perpetrated this pound/peseta subterfuge. This could go on no longer, Lorimer realized; his own life – its careful security, its deliberate order – was being so undermined that he could foresee a serious collapse. He had to find a way of expelling this interloper. The cuckoo was in the nest and growing more comfortable daily; there was only limited time before the fledgling Lorimer would no longer be able to cope.
‘The trouble is I can’t get on top of things,’ Torquil said, the self-pity immense. ‘I’ve got no time. Everything’s piling up. I have to find a way of being paid in cash – in advance or at once.’ He set his jaw. ‘I know it’s immoral, but I don’t think there’s any choice, Lorimer. I have to do it.’
‘What?’
‘Sell drugs – ecstasy, heroin, crack. I don’t care any more, I’m at the end of my tether. Society is forcing me into this. It’s society’s fault, and Binnie’s, not mine.’
Of course. Lorimer suddenly saw the answer with absolute clarity, marvelling at how the mind worked independently of instructions, sometimes.
‘Listen, Torquil, if I could get you a well-paid job, cash, that would solve your immediate financial problems, but that involved an eighteen – to twenty-hour day, would you take it?’
‘Would I take it? I’d work a twenty-four-hour day if necessary. Tell me where and when.’
‘I just have to make one phone call.’
Lorimer punched out the numbers on the phone in the kitchen, feeling his heart lighten at the prospect of the cuckoo, if not expelled, at least absent for most of the time.
‘Yeah?’ said the voice at the end of the line.
‘It’s Milo. Is your Cortina still in running order? Good. I’ve got a driver for you.’
390. Origin of the Name ‘David Watts’. Torquil told me this. One of the few interesting facts Torquil ever told me.
‘Know why he calls himself David Watts?’ No, why? ‘It’s that song by the Kinks.’ Never heard of them. ‘Jesus Christ, you must have, one of the legendary rock bands of the 1960s. ‘Rings a bell, I said, now you mention it.
Torquil stood up as if he was performing and sang in a throaty tenor and cod-cockney accent: ‘FAH-fuh-fuh-FAH-FAH, FAH-FAH-FAH.’ He sang the whole song, word-perfect, which is narrated by ‘a dull and simple lad, who cannot tell water from champagne’ and who fantasizes about David Watts, a truly heroic schoolboy, epic scrapper, rich, captain of the team, head boy, whom all the girls in the neighbourhood fancy something rotten. The chorus, the refrain, repeated wistfully, ‘I wish I could be like David Watts, I wish I could be like David Watts, I wish I could be like David Watts.’ It was a song about someone who could do no wrong, someone who was revered and worshipped by his peers, someone who, to all intents and purposes, was perfect. I began to understand a little more clearly: this was how Martin Foster became David Watts.
The Book of Transfiguration