Unpredictable tides of energy, and the staring eyes of pedestrians and motorists, had seemed to pull his thoughts apart and then compress him into a muttering standstill. He was thinking of too many things at the same time, but then forgetting one train of thought at the same time as another began.
The pressure the city exerted upon him was tangible. Uncomfortable, like a head-slappy wind on a hilltop, or a coat pocket caught on a door handle. Unless he was inside the house, or Happy Shop, he didn’t fit in anywhere and was in everyone’s way. And so his recent life had been reduced to quick forays outside the house, because he was unable to cope with anything else and wasn’t wanted anywhere. Never had been. The house had opened his eyes. And there was now something wrong with one of his legs; a pain that started inside a hip. So he should keep off it.
On the day he went out to buy the tools, the further he ventured from the house, the greater was his physical discomfort and his confusion. Frank lit endless cigarettes for the slight comfort they promised. Silk Cut. He’d started smoking again at the weekend after being driven by an unstoppable urge to light up during the National Lottery. At the bus stop, fat pigeons had scurried around his feet and watched him with amber eyes.
After boarding a bus, he’d made his way upstairs. With his bad hip it had been similar to standing upright in a rowing boat. Sitting by the window as the bus trundled toward Selly Oak, where he knew there was a DIY store, he’d looked down at the streets for women wearing tight skirts and leather boots; such a sight usually made him dizzy with longing. Now the women and their clothes just appeared ordinary, and he felt dead to the previously strong images. This impotence led to an incredulity that such a part of himself had ever existed.
From a seat in front of him, a mobile phone began to ring in a girl’s handbag. The noise distracted Frank from what had seemed like important, meaningful thoughts that he could barely remember a few moments later. He’d groaned aloud. The girl spoke in a loud voice. ‘Oh, Jesus,’ he’d said, wanting to take the phone from her hand and drop it out of the window. He’d wanted to hear it smash on the asphalt below.
Muttering under his breath to prevent himself swearing aloud, he was forced to listen to the stranger’s conversation. The girl’s voice was controlled and sounded too much like a prepared speech to be part of a natural discourse. There were no pauses, or repetitions, or silences; just her going blah, blah, blah, and addressing everyone on the bus. It was not a phone that she was holding, but a microphone. Perhaps the most disappointing thing about getting older, he’d mused, was to still be confronted by childish actions and behaviour, these increments of self-importance and vanity that he now observed all about him whenever he left home.
By the time he reached the Bristol Road, Frank had felt sickened by his aversion to everything around him. A hot loathing, but a fascination too, and a pitiful desperation to be included. In one mercifully brief moment, he’d also wished to be burned to ash and to have his name erased from every record in existence. He was rubbish. No one wanted him around. He’d dabbed the corner of one eye with a tissue and had wanted to go home, back to the house.
As the bus brushed the edge of Selly Oak he’d fallen asleep. And awoken to find the vehicle had trundled and wheezed into streets he didn’t recognise. He’d slept through his stop and found himself in a bleak part of Birmingham that he had never seen before. Somewhere behind Longbridge maybe? In a panic, he’d fled down the stairs, alighted and then stood beside a closed factory and a wholesaler of saris.
Everything there was inhospitable. Self-loathing had choked him. Can I not leave the house without a map? He’d lived in the city for ten years, but he recognised none of this. It was as if the streets and buildings had actually moved to disorient him while he’d slept on the bus.