Eleven Read online

  Chris rummaged in the pocket of his shorts for a scrap of grubby tissue to give her.

  ‘I’ll go and tell Mrs Hobson.’

  ‘Don’t do that. It’s stopped.’

  ‘No, I don’t mean I’ll dob you in. I mean – she can help.’

  ‘Please don’t tell her.’

  She clutched his elbow. He stayed where he was. The two of them had just taken their first steps towards their first kiss, at a barbecue in fifteen years’ time.

  The group agreed, with the taciturn efficiency kids sometimes demonstrate, to gloss over the nosebleed by working extra hard on their presentation. That afternoon, Chris and Matilda, Russell and Bec walked to the bus stop four abreast, and nobody else dared to speak to them. Chris was so happy he couldn’t sleep; he was in a gang.

  The gang of four, as they were later to be called by mutual friends, became an institution. Bec was elegant and orderly, Matilda freckled and scruffy, always in laddered tights, T-shirts too big or small; Russell slow and ponderous, constantly needing Chris’s help with homework. Russell and Bec became a couple at age fourteen: Russell’s chunky face, from then on, bore the permanent expression of a man who has found a woman far beyond his reasonable expectations. Chris and Matilda took a little longer. They maintained that their friendship was too precious to risk on a romance. Nonetheless it seemed a matter of time, because it was the only outcome that made sense. The four of them went on holidays together, took voluntary jobs together, were routinely invited to parties and even weddings as a group, as if they were one person. They were scarcely out of each other’s sight for more than a day in twenty years.

  After a short indulgence in nostalgia Xavier manages to drift off to sleep; but, as very often, his dream drags him back to Melbourne. He’s in the Botanic Gardens with the gang of four, as well as Michael, Bec and Russell’s baby son. Michael takes a few faltering steps, chasing a bird with a long beak; his small legs get in each other’s way and he topples over. Everyone laughs, but Michael starts to cry in pain. Throughout this, Xavier is not quite immersed in the dream: even as he watches it, some part of his brain knows it is not really happening, could never happen, and makes a conscious effort to emerge from it.

  Eventually Xavier is yanked out of the dream and the disappeared times it shakily presents by an urgent thumping on the door. He sits straight up in bed. The thumping stops and then restarts. Through the drawn curtains comes a subdued white glow, and he remembers the snow last night. Wearing the T-shirt and boxer shorts he slept in, Xavier stumbles to the front door and opens it cautiously.

  At first there seems to be nobody there. Xavier looks down and there at knee-height is a three-year-old boy who, rather taken aback by the success of his door-thumping, is wondering what to do next. Xavier and Jamie – who lives in the garden flat downstairs, and will one day develop an antibody against two kinds of cancer – look at each other.

  Before either can say anything, Jamie’s mother has come up the stairs and onto the landing.

  ‘Come here, Jamie! JAMIE!’ she yells, and then, to Xavier, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry!’

  ‘That’s fine,’ says Xavier.

  ‘What are you doing bothering the man?’ she reprimands her son, who spiritedly resists her attempts to take his hand. ‘Come on.’

  Jamie yells something about the snow.

  ‘Yes, we’ll go out in the snow as soon as Mummy’s parcel is delivered.’

  Jamie shakes his head and hits a radiator with his little fist; the parcel is nowhere near a good enough excuse. He moans and skips about like a dog on too short a lead.

  His mother, whose name is Mel, grimaces at Xavier.

  ‘I’m really sorry.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ says Xavier.

  They look at each other for a few seconds, uneasy. Mel is embarrassed because this is yet another instance of her having failed to control her son. Xavier feels awkward because, even though Mel knows that he works nights, there is something shaming about having just woken up when the other person has clearly been awake and dressed for some hours. Mel feels like a poor parent because there is no father to take Jamie out in the snow, because her marriage ended in ill will last year, and she hasn’t yet stopped feeling that everyone aware of this fact is in possession of a negative opinion of her. After all these embarrassments have been played out in silence, the two of them smile at each other sheepishly and Mel disappears down the stairs with Jamie in reluctant tow.

  Jamie has a track record of misbehaviour dating back to long before Mel’s husband left; almost back to the night, which Xavier remembers well, when a black cab pulled up outside and the soon-to-be-separated couple triumphantly emerged with their new treasure in a Moses basket. Xavier, who had a night off from the radio show – so it must have been a Friday or Saturday – marvelled at how tiny a human could be, and how this inert thing, his fingernails almost too small to see, could have a whole complicated life mapped out ahead of him. That is, if lives are mapped out in advance, which Xavier often likes to believe they are.

  Almost from that first night, the new resident of 11 Bayham Road began to make an impression. When Xavier came back from the show at four thirty in the morning, the lights would always be on in the garden flat, and the silhouettes of the weary first-time parents would flicker against the curtains. He would hear the husband, Keith, going leaden-footed to work in the morning, and their tired arguments in the early evening. But Jamie’s specific aptitude, beyond mere noise-making, was for mischief. He ate the front page of the newly delivered phone book sitting in the entrance hall. His pudgy little fingers tweaked a dial and reset the electricity meter to zero, baffling the man who came to read it, and eventually bringing a fine on all the residents. He would lie in wait on the stairs and ambush visitors with blows to the knee from a toy power-drill or fire engine. Most alarmingly, he has recently developed a habit of darting outside, whenever the door is open, and making as if to run onto the busy road that runs past the house with its three flats stacked on top of each other.

  He is trailed everywhere by his mother, always three seconds behind, scrambling to keep the latest object out of his mouth or impair his progress towards a new hazard, and grimacing apologetically at whoever is there to witness.

  There’s no going back to sleep now, thinks Xavier, even though he only went to bed so recently. He listens to the cries of children, a little older than Jamie, outside. Most schools in the area are closed. There is no sound from the flat above: Tamara, the council officer who lives there, would normally have left by now, clip-clopping past Xavier’s door in her heels. But like more than half of London’s workforce, today she will not be going in to work. Today is an unusual day.

  The kitchen sink is a nest of unwashed cups and plates, the cupboards contain various food items past the peaks of their careers. Xavier has rented this flat for nearly five years, and in his hands it has, if not deteriorated, then at least fallen into a sort of torpor. Maybe if I had a girlfriend I’d make more effort, Xavier thinks, and remembers tonight’s speed-dating arrangement. Boiling the kettle, he rues Murray’s persuasiveness, or whatever it is, sheer pathos perhaps. The event, like all singles nights, has an anticipatory ring of grimness about it. Perhaps it’ll be called off, because of the weather, but he doubts it: the sort of people bold enough to sign up for dating events are unlikely to be deterred by a freeze, he thinks, even one of this severity.

  Early that afternoon Xavier leaves the flat to buy groceries. The sky is just a colourless mass hanging over London, quiescent, as if faintly embarrassed by its outburst last night. The pavements are slick with ice patches between carpets of squelchy, footmarked sludge. The air is cold to the touch like cutlery in a forgotten drawer. Xavier keeps his hands inside the sleeves of his overcoat. The owner of the corner shop, a cheerful paunchy middle-aged Indian man who will die in three years’ time, puts Xavier’s items into a blue plastic bag before Xavier can say that he’s brought his own. Not wanting to seem petty, Xavier doesn’t menti
on it.

  On his way back down the hill Xavier becomes aware of a disturbance on the other side of the street. From a clump of black jackets rises a hoarse chorus, the carefully modulated voices of teenage boys, who are collected around what seems to be a package of some sort on the floor. As he gets closer, Xavier can see that the package is actually another boy, wriggling and squirming as five other youths take turns to drop snow on his head. The felled boy, who is slightly smaller than the others, gives a shrill yell and tries to get to his feet, but each time he is pushed back down by one of the bullies. His yells become honking sobs of misery. One of the biggest lads steps away and bends down to pick up a two-glove load of snow, which he packs down between his hands and then dumps on the victim’s head. There is a collective cackle. The victim now looks like a dismantled tent spread out at the feet of his aggressors, half-obscured by chunks of snow.

  Xavier takes a furtive glance around: there is no one else to intervene here. He advances towards the group. Scrambling for more snow, they pay him no attention.

  He clears his throat.

  ‘You should stop that,’ he says, his normally resonant voice sounding reedy and hesitant in the cold air.

  A couple of the boys look up. Xavier feels a shiver go through him: they’re older and more substantial than they looked from across the street, and he’d have very little chance if they all turned on him at once.

  ‘Fuck off,’ says one of the kids.

  ‘Leave him alone,’ says Xavier.

  Now all of them are looking at him.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ The ringleader, who issues this challenge, has a beginner’s moustache, mean eyes, a slack, contemptuous mouth.

  Xavier hesitates.

  One of the other boys makes as if to charge him, taking four or five quick steps with his fist outstretched. Xavier flinches and all the boys laugh. Xavier has already had enough of this situation and wants to be out of it. He’s well into his thirties, these boys are less than half his age; and yet, he thinks, irritated, I’m afraid of them.

  ‘Just leave him alone,’ he says again, but then turns and walks away, his cheeks flushing at the sound of raucous, triumphant laughter over his shoulder.

  He leaves the scene as quickly as he can, not looking back to see the continued tormenting of the boy. Reaching the safety of 11 Bayham Road, he slams the door and shakes the snow off the bottom of his trousers and walks up the stairs, past the ground floor flat where Jamie is being pacified by a TV show. ‘Here we go, here we go, here we go again!’ Xavier hears a woman sing in a strained, hectic voice.

  During the afternoon he looks back on the incident with discomfort, feeling he could have done much more. Of course, he could also have done much less: he might have ignored the entire scene. But perhaps that would have been better than such a half-hearted attempt. He wonders what state the boy got home in, and then immediately dismisses the speculation. He coaxes the gas hob into a spitting life and puts a pan of soup on to heat.

  Perhaps trying to make a dent in the residual guilt left by the event, Xavier devotes a portion of the afternoon to catching up with some of the emails sent by his listeners. He always gives an email address after the show, for the many people who don’t get through on air, and his listening duties now extend well beyond the boundaries of the show itself. Xavier always tries to limit himself to one personal reply per correspondent, to avoid getting drawn into long exchanges with people he doesn’t really know, because there just isn’t enough time; after that, he sends a stock response directing the writer to other sources of help. Again, perhaps he could do more, but on the other hand he could ignore the emails altogether, if he were so inclined.

  Monday is the heaviest day for emails: the weekend’s expanses of free time can provoke some worryingly detailed confessions, some particularly vivid expressions of loneliness. This afternoon, most of the appeals are of a more practical nature.

  Xavier, what would you do if your wife was hell-bent on wearing a bikini, but you wanted to tell her – gently – that she didn’t have the figure for it?

  I need your help. I have debts of more than £50,000. My wife doesn’t know, nor do the kids, nor does anyone.

  He challenges the bikini victim to decide whether it is really his own vanity that’s at stake; he encourages the debt victim to come clean to his wife.

  Troubled people have always instinctively sought Xavier out, or he has attracted them by some accidental magnetism. He’s the sort of person who always ends up hearing a taxi driver’s grievances, nodding sympathetically at the woes of a suddenly loquacious stranger in a lift. Perhaps it helps that women find him handsome (there’s often something seductive about confidences, even very awkward ones), or perhaps it’s just that he has the rare skill of keeping quiet. In any case, Xavier was accustomed to listening to people well before it formed part of his job – indeed, the habit developed when he was still known as Chris.

  Once, in his twenties, Chris talked to a complete stranger in the street for more than an hour. It was an early October night, and Melbourne was tuning up for the long summer ahead. The air was lush with the hint of heat, the sky a gently paling blue, with an even paler moon hanging lazily in it. Chris’s arm was around Matilda’s back: not yet an official couple, they were in a tantalizing period of affectionate touches, in-jokes and pet names. He could feel the joint of her bra through the old Nirvana T-shirt she wore. At the corner of Brunswick and Johnston Street the three of them went one way and Chris the other, to wait for a tram.

  At the stop was a homeless old man, wearing a baseball cap and with a can of lager in his hand. Chris said a polite hello and the two of them stood quietly for a few minutes, watching trams rattle up the other side of the street. A girl was pasting posters for a rock band on a brick wall behind them. Chris thought about Matilda, whom he’d been to watch in a trampolining competition the previous day. Each time she sprang skywards, he imagined leaping up and catching her mid-air. The old man started to sing quietly to himself, glancing amiably at Chris. He seemed like a drunk, but a harmless one: one who’d had so much booze in his life that he could never really get drunk any more, but would never seem entirely sober either.

  He winked at Chris.

  ‘Had a good day?’

  ‘Not so bad. Just went to a film.’

  ‘A film!’ The old man chuckled. ‘Do you know how long it is since I went to a film?’ He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. ‘It would be twenty years, I reckon.’

  Not knowing how to respond, Chris asked, ‘How . . . how has your day been?’

  ‘You know,’ said the stranger, ‘I’m eighty years old next month. Hell of an age, isn’t it!’

  ‘It’s pretty good,’ Chris agreed.

  ‘When you get to my age, there are a lot of things you don’t want to think about. So what I do is, I have a vault in my brain where I put all that stuff. See what I mean?’

  He fumbled with a cigarette, his hand shaking as it coaxed a worn lighter out of his jacket pocket. Chris took the cigarette and lit it for him.

  ‘I just say to myself, that’s in the vault now,’ the man continued. ‘And I never let myself go in there. It’s locked. It’s locked even to me. I don’t know where the key is.’ He grinned at Chris, showing a surprisingly good set of teeth.

  Trams went whirring by. Over the next hour the man told Chris that his wife died young and his brother, an Anzac, was killed in action in 1944. His sons, both of them, turned out disappointingly: one could have been a football player but was too lazy, the other went to France and got into, as the man put it, ‘you know, drugs and art’. The man’s business, a shop selling groceries, was squeezed to death over the course of a couple of decades by the advent of chain newsagents, 7-11s and all the rest. The man realized as he got into his forties that he was attracted to young boys, and would never be able to satisfy such a craving. He embezzled a sum of money in the mid-seventies, to boost his business, and when it came to light more than ten year
s later it was one of his best friends who went to jail. And so on.

  ‘Yep, pretty much most things have gone wrong,’ the old man concluded with another of his toothy grins. ‘And I know it all happened – I just told you all about it, right? But I don’t think about it. I don’t go in the vault. See what I mean?’

  Chris asked, ‘Are you ever going to open the . . . vault? Like, to get it out of your system?’

  The old man lit another cigarette and coughed and grinned.

  ‘When I know I’m going to die,’ he said, ‘maybe in the last hour, I’ll open it up and have a good think about everything, and I’ll think well, it’s over now, what the hell was I worried about?’

  When the next tram came past, the old man, his eyes suddenly watery and imploring, took Chris’s sleeve and asked him for a dollar. Chris gave him a ten-dollar note and boarded the tram.

  As the four-way friendship became older and more complex, he was called upon more and more to be the unofficial leader of the gang of four, its most capable pair of hands. Often, it was Russell who needed help: he couldn’t seem to stay in a job, not even a job where he had to dress as a carrot and hand out leaflets for a juice bar; he never had any money; Bec couldn’t get pregnant. Chris’s twenty-year friendship with Russell was, in many ways, good preparation for working with Murray: similar men, slightly overweight, hapless, inspiring goodwill and a certain foreboding, like sporting competitors everyone roots for but fully expects to lose.