Rhinoceros 3
The following day Alan sat in his favourite chair all day. The radio was on in the kitchen, but he didn’t listen to it. The phone rang itself into a hollow echo. Somewhere beyond the space occupied by his unfocused thoughts the world went about knitting its web of life and death.
Alan ate food out of tins and left toast to go cold within the toaster. He didn’t have the distraction of a TV, so he spent some time looking out of the window, but the world had little of any interest to say to him. Beyond the ring road a huge crane seemed to be holding up a new tower block. Its operator had, either bravely or foolishly depending on your viewpoint, hung an England flag from the top. Alan absently watched whole cycles of traffic lights at a junction and calculated and then forgot the intricate flows of traffic and pedestrians. Passers-by left tiny clouds of breath in the air as they hurried to work or talked. Alan turned to his flat, inwardly, as it where. The furniture, functional, cheap, ill-matched, supported a variety of magazines, books, papers, school work. An armchair, the centre of his world, stood sagging and welcoming in the middle of the room. A lamp and a CD player where within arms reach, as were writing implements, a notebook, and a thumbed novel open and laying on its broken spine expectantly. Box files, CDs, books, photos, cards and shoe boxes occupied shelves without apparent system or provenance. Through a door he could glimpse his kitchen, small and neat, if out of date. But again, functional. Alan felt that if something did a job, no practical purpose would be served in replacing it. The only reason he had his battered Ford Focus was because the chassis snapped on his old Astra. He felt quite righteous in this outlook, even as his pupils called him a saddo. Now he slumped back into his armchair and considered his current position to the sound of the distant world beyond his window and the hushed voices from his radio in the kitchen.
An entire cycle of events rotated in choreographed unison across the framework of his sitting room, following the light ignited and extinguished by an unseen orbital life-force. The murmur of traffic and far-off machinery collected and settled in layers like strata of leaves, or dust, the imprimatur of a city making a new day into an old one. The traces of car exhausts and aircraft vapour trails became the pattern of some kind of life force on the retina of his dimmed eyes.
Alan stared into the void vacated by the charging form of Ryon while his mind roved around the furniture and strewn objects of his flat, seeking out that missing item.
***
Eventually he picked up the phone.
“Alan?”
“Oh, hi Annie.”
“You sound like you’ve won the lottery and lost your ticket.”
“I’m fine,” Alan replied, but his voice continued to give him away. There was a long pause during which he was supposed to ask how she was feeling.
“Have you remembered tonight?” Annie eventually asked.
“What?”
“But of course, you forgot.” She seemed more satisfied than cross.
“Forgot what?”
The restaurant, it turned out, was Indian, just off Charter Row in the town centre. Alan surmised that not many men continued to go out socially with their ex-wives. Alan wasn’t entirely sure why he did, though in moments of harsh reflection he understood that he didn’t really have a social life of his own. It had been frequently commented that throughout the process of divorce and settlement Alan was unusually forgiving and philosophical. It was almost as though the states of husband and divorcee were equally enlightening. Occasionally he rebelled against this dependency, but generally not. On this evening Annie had brought along Robert, her bland, balloon-faced husband, and someone from work called Jen.
In contrast to Robert’s features, placed pointlessly in a desert of emptiness, like tumbleweed, Jen’s face was a picture of animation with an arrangement of freckles, dark lashes, excitable brows and an elastic, expressive mouth.
After the usual introductions and small talk and fussing over where to sit, Alan found himself next to Jen and opposite Annie and Robert. He suspected some kind of blind-date set-up, and watched their faces carefully for signs of sneaky eye contact.
The restaurant was dark, and decorated in deep red with gold edgings and detail. Sculptures of elephant heads and Buddhas watched diners benignly from recesses around the room. A recording of a sitar tinkled unassumingly in the background.
“Alan, is that a cut on your head?” Annie frowned with her concerned-but-slightly-cross voice.
“Hmm, yes, I met a burglar the other day and came off worse.”
Annie gasped, and Jen looked at him quite distraught. Even bland Robert registered moderate concern.
“Street robbery?” Annie asked.
“No, in the flat.” A waiter hovered, stooping and expectant, at their table, and Annie waved him away, somewhat peremptorily in Alan’s view. He had not eaten well for the last four days and realised he was extremely hungry.
“Don’t tell me you left the flat unlocked again?”
“Well…”
“Do you know,” Annie continued regardless, and turning pointedly to Jen, “he’d forget his own head if it detached. I went round with his Christmas cards last month and the door was wide open. And where was Alan? Fast asleep in that smelly armchair.” She turned back to Alan with a withering look. “You may as well put an ad in the local paper: ‘help yourself’.” She made mocking speechmarks with her fingers.
But Jen looked concerned. “I’m sure we’re all a bit forgetful…”
“There’s forgetful, and there’s Alan. Three words: passport, flight, Tunisia. Do they mean anything to you, Alan?”
There was a long pause. Alan looked for gender solidarity from Robert but instead encountered a face of mouldable dough, waiting to be punched and kneaded.
Alan tried hard not to generalise from specifics, but he reflected sharply that some women sure had a remarkable capacity for dredging up past crimes for re-trial. Or at least the very small number of women he had ever known. There were no offences spent in the female world. He was constantly at risk of being undermined by history. Already, before he had picked up his fork, Alan was finding society, once again, to be an ordeal. Besides which, the passport incident was not entirely his fault; and they did eventually get a flight to Tunisia for the reminder of their pre-booked week.
“What do you do, Alan?” asked Jen brightly, as though reading his spiralling mood. She probably already knew, thought Alan, but she was trying very hard, and deserved his full attention.
“Well…”
“He works with the lowest of the low, Jen,” Annie answered.
“My spokeswomen,” Alan interjected with a hand gesture of introduction. No-one smiled, and he began to feel like he’d just been moved down three sets at school.
“They put all the worse druggies, thugs, psychos and thieves into one school and then he chooses to work there.”
“Must be rewarding,” smiled Jen.
“Not really.”
“In fact – “ Annie was getting dangerously loud already, one glass of wine in, and Alan checked the reactions of other diners. “In fact, it was probably one of them that broke into your flat. Did you see him?”
“It happened quickly…”
“I’ll bet you any money it was one of those nutters you teach. You’re a good teacher, Alan – you’re wasted in that dump.”
Alan sighed, as though treading a familiar path. “They are not ‘nutters’, as you succinctly put it. They are damaged – “
“Hold on, I’ll get my violin. Not that you’ve got anything worth stealing. You haven’t even got a bloody TV. Have you got anything of value? Your clothes look like they are from Oxfam…” Jen and Robert were starting to look uncomfortable. Alan felt, briefly, that the three of them could easily overpower Annie and shut her up.
“All the best labels are to be found in the charity shops these days,” Alan hopefully put in.
“You haven’t even replaced the furniture you borrowed or loaned when we divorced. Most modern men keep up with fashions, have iPods, satellite tellies, digital radios, at least. Yours would be recognised by Lord Reith. Have you got Wi Fi? A good phone? Have you even got a bloody camera?”
Alan felt the skin ripple up his neck as a twist of electricity alerted him towards a memory. It was a dark package of a memory tucked into the recesses of his mind, hidden away, and marked: ‘bloody camera’. He panicked, but with a huge dose of adrenalin-powered resolve he controlled his desire to run out of the restaurant there and then, and he measured out his words and movements carefully. “I’ve got what I need. And if anything has gone I’ll replace it. Besides, I don’t think I gave him enough time. The flat looked just as I left it.”
“You mean like a tip,” was Annie’s helpful qualification.
“You need to do an inventory. They usually go for electronic things, gadgets.” Jen really was trying hard, but Alan wanted to leave the subject.
“Mmm, I’m hungry,” he said.
“I believe you bought a camera recently, didn’t you?” Robert piped up. Was there a streak of maliciousness behind that plain bed sheet of a face?
“Did I?” I’ll have to check.” Alan tried to sound disinterested, glancing around for the waiter.
“Yes, you did,” said Annie. “You said you were going to do a project of some kind.”
“Probably,” Alan replied airily. “Can’t remember what I did with it.”
“You wanted something specifically with a good zoom lens, I remember,” Annie went on.
“Cameras are very saleable, Alan. Small and expensive. Did you get a good one?” Jen smiled.
Christ, Alan thought, how many more times do they have to blurt out that word? “Oh, just a standard one, I think. Where is the waiter?”
“Panasonics are good,” Robert said, his face a perfect moon of seeming indifference.
Alan could feel himself sweating. A drip ran from his armpit. “Really? I think the lamb vindaloo for me.”
“Alan wouldn’t know a Panasonic from a panorama. I wouldn’t be surprised to find he’d taken twenty pictures of his right eye.” And Annie looked scornfully at Alan, in that way that used to wind him up so much, almost make him want to smash something. Almost. But that was in the old days.
“Of course cameras are nearly obsolete,” Robert smoothly continued.
Alan was sinking fast. “Oh god,” he muttered.
“Oh you mean because of phones,” Jen said.
“Can we please talk about anything but fucking cameras?” Alan suddenly exclaimed, surprising himself at least as much as his companions, an elderly couple at the adjacent table, and the belatedly re-emergent waiter. Robert registered weak discomfort, and Jen was positively aghast. Annie re-arranged her features quickly and efficiently into a What Did I Tell You configuration. “Sorry,” Alan added, lamely. “I’m just a bit hungry.”
It would have taken more of a supreme effort to save the evening than the four of them, collectively, were clearly able to put in, and so inevitably, after a few attempts at resuscitation by each in turn, it died – as Alan succinctly summed up to himself – on its arse.
He almost ran to his car; it was worse than that, a kind of undignified speed walk, leaving the combined stares of Annie, Jen and Robert behind him, his keys poised long before he was within range, in his head a mantra in time to his footsteps, ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck…’
Which was a shame. Alan was not so unbalanced that he didn’t feel guilty about his behaviour. And somewhere in his mind, he registered that Jen was a pleasant and attractive companion. And she probably assumed that he was running to get away from her. But he had things on his mind.
A camera.
