By the time he got the vacuum cleaner out of the apartment and onto the stairs Richard was wondering if he had ever suffered so. This, surely, is how we account for the darkness and the helpless melancholy of twentieth-century literature. These writers, these dreamers and seekers, stood huddled like shivering foundlings on the cliffs of a strange new world: one with no servants in it. On the stairs and landings there were bikes leaning everywhere, and also shackled to the walls-and to the ceiling. He lived in a beehive of bikers.
By the time he got the vacuum cleaner down into the hall Richard was sure that Samuel Beckett, at some vulnerable time in his life, had been obliged to take a vacuum cleaner in. Celine, too, and perhaps Kafka-if they had vacuum cleaners then. Richard gave himself a loud breather while he looked through his mail. His mail he no longer feared. The worst was over. Why should a man fear his mail, when, not long ago, he had received a solicitor's letter from his own solicitor? When, rather less recently, in response to a request for more freelance work, he had been summarily fired, through the post, by his own literary agent? When he was being sued (for advances paid on unwritten books) by both hisex-publishers? Most of the time, though, his mail was just junk. Once, in the street, on an agitated April afternoon, on his way back from lunch with some travel editor in some transient trattoria, he had seen a city cyclone of junk mail-leaflike leaflets, flying flyers, circling circulars- and had nodded, and thought: me, my life. And a lot of the time he got no mail at all. Now, on the morning of this his fortieth birthday, he received one small check and two large bills-and a brown envelope, hand-delivered (no address, no stamp), featuring his own name in tortured block capitals, with the accurate but unfamiliar addendum, "M.A. (Oxon)." He put it in his pocket, and once more shouldered his load.
Calchalk Street was to be found off Ladbroke Grove, a good half-mile beyond Westway. For a time it looked as though Calchalk Street was going up in the world. Richard and Gina had formed part of the influx of new money, more than half a decade ago, soon after their marriage, along with several other youngish couples whom they would see and smile at in the corner shop, in the coin-op launderette. For a while, that spring, under the apple blossom, Calchalk Street was a wholesome jingle of progress music, with a tap-tap here and a bang-bang there-there were skips and scaffolds, and orange pyramids of builders' sand. Then all the couples moved back out again, except Richard and Gina. Offered gentrification, Calchalk Street had said-no thanks. Instead it reassumed a postwar identity of rationing and rent books. Offered color, it stayed monochrome; even the Asians and West Indians who lived there had somehow become Saxonized-they loped and leered, they peed, veed, queued, effed and blinded, just like the locals. Calchalk Street had a terrible pub, the Adam and Eve (the scene, for Richard, of many a quivering glassful), and a terrible sub post office, outside which, at eight o'clock every weekday morning, a queue of Hildas and Gildas, of Nobbies and Noddies, desperately coalesced, clutching forms. There were Irish families crammed into basements, and pregnant housewives chain-smoking on the stoops, and bendy old men in flares and parched gym-shoes drinking tinned beer under the warm breath of the coin-op. They even had whores, up there on the corner-a little troupe of them. Richard moved past these young women, thinking, as he always thought: You're shitting me. In parkas, in windbreakers, grim, ruddy, they presented themselves as socioeconomic functionaries. For money they kept the lid on men in cars.
A vacuum cleaner is designed to cruise grandly round a carpet. It is not designed to be toted through a wet London Wednesday, with the traffic trailing its capes of mist. Painfully hampered, cruelly encumbered, Richard staggered on, the brown base under his arm as heavy asa soaked log, the T-shaped adjunct in his free hand, the tartan flex-tube round his neck like a fat scarf, and then the plug, freed from its broken catchlet, incensingly adangle between his legs. The "freshness and moral vivacity," the "bravely unfashionable optimism" and the "unembarrassed belief in human perfectibility" for which Amelior was now being retrospectively praised-all this would presumably get even better when its successor appeared, now that Gwyn Barry never had to take the vacuum cleaner in. Richard crossed Ladbroke Grove with his head down, not looking and not caring. The plug and cord snarled his ankles like a hurled bolero. The tartan tube clutched his neck in a pythonic embrace.
Once in the shop he let the whole contraption crash to the counter, on which he then leaned for a while with his head in his arms. When he looked up again a young man was standing over him and readying a foolscap document. Richard croaked his way through MAKE, model,
REGISTRATION NUMBER. At length they came to TYPE OF MALFUNCTION, and the young man said,
"What's wrong with it?"
"How would I know? It cuts out all the time and it makes this screeching sound and the bag leaks all the crap out of the back."
The young man considered Richard, and this information. His stare and his biro returned to the relevant rectangle. The biro hovered there unhappily. He looked up for a moment-time enough for onerous eye contact. He looked down. The biro itself now struck you as gnawed, cracked and capless, and paranoid, conscious of its disadvantage. Eventually, under type OF MALFUNCTION, the young man wrote NOT WORKING.
"Yeah," said Richard. "That ought to cover it."
Beyond them, in the street outside, the old divisions of class and then race were giving way to the new divisions: good shoes versus bad shoes, good eyes as opposed to bad eyes (eyes that were clear, at one extreme, ranged against eyes that were far fierier than any Tabasco), different preparedness for the forms that urban life was currently taking, here and now. The young man looked at Richard with pain and with pre-weakened hostility. He had gone on working here much longer than he should have gone on working here, and so his eyes were as dim and marginal as the lights of a car left on all night and well into the next day. What divided the two of them, in the shop, was words-which were the universal (at least on this planet); the young man could look at Richard and be pretty sure there were more where they came from. Display fixtures were tacked to the wall, decorative or labor-saving, white cones and spheres. Beyond, in the back, in a valved heap like the wet city, lay all thestuff that wasn't working and would never work again: the unrecom-pleted, the undescribed.
On his way home he looked in at the Adam and Eve. Seated in the corner with a pint of bitter and a packet of Wotsits, the birthday boy slipped the brown envelope out of his pocket: Richard Tull, M.A. (Oxon). At Oxford (to hear Richard tell it), Gwyn had worked round the clock for his middle second, whereas Richard had taken a formal first without ever lifting a pen . . . He removed a single sheet of paper that might have been torn from a child's exercise book: blue-lined, softly creased, suggesting much effort, and little progress. The letter had been heavily corrected by another hand, but it still said,
Dear Richard You are the writer of a "novel." Aforethought. Congratulations! Hows it done. First, you get the topic. Next you package it. Then, comes the hipe.
I am thinking of becoming "an author." Snap. Shake. If you would like to meet and discuss these issues over a few "jars" feel free to give me a bell.
Yours DARKO
Well-known writers get this kind of letter every other day. But Richard was not a well-known writer, and he got this kind of letter every other year (and they were normally about book reviewing anyway- though he did receive the odd scrawled note from hospitals and mental institutions where his novels were found in the libraries or on the book trolleys and stirred strange responses in depressives and amputees and other patients whose minds were disorganized by drugs). So Richard looked at this letter rather harder than a well-known writer would have done. And his scrutiny was rewarded: in the lower left-hand corner of the half-filled sheet, almost hidden by the fringe of the rip, it said, TPO. Richard turned the page over.