Sample Chapter

SAMPLE CHAPTER 15




There was dust and then there was dust.  There was nothing to be about it; the battle between dust and its adversaries was a losing one as far as any honest person knew.  Dust could be attacked daily, sprayed, wiped away, flicked, sucked up into all manner of machines, the air about conditioned, filtered and humidified.  These assaults may be timed to coincide with the weekend, or left to a specific day, such a day as when fresh starts are made, when all things seem achievable.

Anybody who has ever engaged in this struggle would have a further day, or two or three at the outside, of clean-surfaced satisfaction before the thin gloom of the counter attack descended once more.  There was no getting way from it, dust had been around a long time, long before mankind. Or the earth for that matter; the universe was full of the stuff.

Dave saw dust in a different light.  He had long since reached an accommodation with the dust in his flat.  He did not disturb it.  In return, he expected not to be constantly reminded of its presence in the air he breathed.  It was there of  course, but he did not see it.  As when snow falls, layer upon layer, until it covers everything, the observer sees it and nothing else at first.  Gradually one remembers what is underneath and makes do with that.  I some mundane sense, Dave too had conditioned himself to the presence of objects and possessions that became more obscure with time.  In essence, Dave was dust-blind.

Some of the dust was only days or weeks old.  In the spare bedroom, before Jed had moved in, it had been gathering and settling for six months or more, while on top of his bookcase, where the dust had drifted, there was a perma-layer, the dusty equivalent of a glacial flow, with peaks and troughs, the odd feather mixed in, adding texture.  Net curtains, where Dave could be bothered hanging them, lent a macabre, funereal aspect to the place.  In addition to their griminess, they had the propensity to shed clouds of dust if disturbed, an effect with which Dave had amused himself on more than one occasion.

Furthermore, he had adopted a system of domesticity incomprehensible to an outsider.  In his mind he had divided the flat into dry rooms and wet rooms.  The dry rooms – living room, lounge, bedrooms and entrance hall, all distinguished in Dave’s scheme by being carpeted, received only scant attention for his vacuum cleaner.  He cleared and cleaned the coffee table maybe once or twice a month, otherwise it filled with newspapers and mail, piled high and occasionally spilling onto the floor.  Dave had always taken the easy way out, whenever in life he could get away with it.  In this instance the line of least resistance lay in stepping over whatever had found its way to the carpet, in order to get from the couch to the door.  The place wouldn’t look so bad later when Dave came back, it would be dark, and he would have had a couple of drinks.

The wet rooms – kitchen, bedroom and the extra shower room that his mother had had tacked on to the back of the building in what had originally been a pantry or coal cellar – were models of hygiene by comparison with their dry, undisturbed neighbours.  Of course the wet rooms had water and all manner of other liquids sloshing about everywhere.  Dave was forever spilling milk, soup, coffee and the rest, which he would have to clean up out of necessity; he was thereby the reluctant agent of order in these rooms.


Panic shopping.  The two words didn’t always sit well together.  Dave imagined that this was some sort of a task that he could do well enough.  There were no rules, as far as he could discern - no finesse was required.  You saw something that you liked, it fitted, you bought it.  Dave wasn’t in the habit of over-analysing an endeavour like shopping.  His brain functions as they applied to such everyday things would pose the question and as often as not, skip to the answer that offered the least likelihood of being the best.

At Whiteleys Dave ran into the first menswear shop he could find.  There were suits hung all around the walls- hundreds of the things.  Dave had no appreciation of the choice he was about to be asked to make.  There was the colour problem.  He only really knew that the top and bottom parts of a suit were made of the same stuff, and that they should be the same size as his body.  Now patterns and shapes, buttons all over the place, pockets for heavens sake, confronted him.  A reptilian shop assistant was approaching from the rear of the shop, sensing Dave’s confusion; Dave’s victim status was all over his face.

“Looking for a suit are we, Sir?” the assistant slithered around to where Dave was standing, taking him in all over with a top to toe appraisal. “You’ll be a thirty eight, or thirty nine with those shoulders.”
Dave shrugged, as if moving the body parts in question would prove the assistant’s point in some way.  “Yeah, I, erm have somewhere to go to, and well a suit is required you might say.  Not a flash shiny black dinner with a bow tie or anything, just a, well a more intimate or errrm, not so big, smaller, fewer…” Dave’s sentence petered out as the inadequacy of his story overtook it.  It was futile to try to justify what he was doing.  This purchase was overdue, he acknowledged as much to himself.  This squirming attempt at rationalising the cocktail of feelings that were assailing him now was just a waste of breath.  The half-man-half-snake clasped his hands together and nodded, keeping his eyes fixed to a point just in front of Dave’s trouser belt.

“Right then.  Let’s say that you require a lounge suit shall we?  May I suggest a charcoal grey Sir?”  Dave felt that the whole process was less a personal decision now that ‘we’ had moved on to a type of suit.  Grey would be fine.  He could wear it for years and if it were dark enough he needn’t get it cleaned very much at all.  He was handed a suit jacket and asked to try it on in front of one of the mirrors on the back wall of the shop.  The sleeves were a touch long, but that apart, Dave liked what he saw.  He fastened the three buttons and took an exaggerated breath. “That’ll be fine.”

“You had better try the trousers on as well Sir.”  The assistant pointed towards a red velvet curtain in the corner.  Dave took the trousers away.  He hadn’t counted on all this stripping off in the shop.  The trousers were tight at the waist and a bit short.  The assistant pushed two fingers into Dave’s waistband and ran his tape around Dave’s girth.  He went back to the rails and returned with the trousers that he judged would be the better fit.  “Try these on Sir.  They should fit you better.  We have a mix and match range so you can always come back in and get, say another pair of trousers to match the jacket.”

Dave mumbled something incoherent to the assistant about how much he had spent already.  It occurred to him that he might buy a shirt and tie too, so he wandered over to the other wall and selected a white shirt at random from the wrack.  There seemed to be many ties to choose from but Dave was impressed by a bright red one with a sunburst in the middle and added that to his tally of shopping.  He went back to the paying point and fished out his cash, paid and left the shop, without the shirt, which the assistant had placed in a separate bag.  He had been concerned about the possibility of buying some shoes but had thought he could get away with hiding his cowboy boots underneath these new trousers.

Dave ran back along Westbourne Grove and almost fell into the pub.  He managed to drink two more bottles of beer, wasting nearly an hour by sitting alone, talking away to himself about the ordeal ahead.  The rest of the journey home was a blank for him.  Dave was standing in the shower, letting the last few drops of soapy water trickle down his body and ebb away from between his toes, cocooned in the steamy afterglow of a good hot shower, when he realised that he hadn’t seen the new shirt since he had been in Whiteleys.

None of his other shirts would look right with the suit.  Dave was facing the prospect of looking foolish on a first date.  It would have been bad enough on any date, he thought, to try to get away with an old shirt with a frayed collar.  Distractedly, he put on his bathrobe and wandered through to sit in front of the television.  There had to be a solution somewhere, maybe the garish tie which he know felt was not the best buy, would distract Inga’s attention away from one of his less flamboyant teddy boy numbers.  No, he to be able to wear something else, the voice inside seemed to be trying its best to steer him away from a clown-like appearance.

Still not thinking of the here and now, Dave stretched out his legs to rest his feet on the table in front of him, scattering a pile of videos and their cases............