Chemistry and Other Stories Read online

  ‘Synchronicity,’ I agreed. ‘A sign and wonder.’

  ‘What do you think?’ she asked. ‘We’ve got more money than we ever spend, haven’t we, we could afford for me to work a day less and take a deep breath and assess what the hell I’m doing with my life.’

  ‘We’re saving the money for when you get pregnant,’ I reminded her.

  ‘How much have we got so far?’ Alli asked.

  ‘Four thousand, three hundred and sixty-seven pounds,’ I said.

  ‘You see?’ she said. ‘Plenty.’

  I was going down the stairs. Tosh was coming up. I’m calling him Tosh because he reminds me of Peter Tosh, the reggae musician. I don’t know his real name, he hasn’t been living here that long. He comes from Birmingham. Well, either that or he’s putting on a Brummie accent for his own amusement. Which he may well be doing. I do such things, so I don’t see why other people shouldn’t. Like, for example, whenever our paths cross (which is not that often) I always say, ‘All right, Tosh?’ which he will think is me saying, ‘All right, mate?’ or ‘All right, pal?’ when in my own head I’m saying, ‘All right, Peter Tosh lookalike?’ You see what I mean? I’m amusing myself, at no one else’s expense. Don’t you do that?

  Anyway, as we passed on the stairs, I said, ‘All right, Tosh?’

  And he said, ‘Fockin lift’s out of action again. Fockin council. I’ll be lite for the fockin gym.’

  Neither of us had stopped. By now we’d passed and were some steps apart. I turned and called up, ‘Now the lift’s not working, you don’t need to go to the gym. You can have all the exercise you want right here.’

  Tosh stopped too and turned and stared down at me.

  ‘Think of the money you’ll save,’ I said.

  ‘Are you tryin to be foonay?’ Tosh asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  Tosh took a step towards me. But perhaps he realised that every step he took down he’d have to retake up, or perhaps he saw that I was not trying to be provocative. So he just shook his head and resumed his ascent, as I resumed my descent.

  Peter Tosh was one of the original Wailers, by the way, along with Bunny Wailer and Bob Marley. Our dad had a stack of reggae records, which we children all listened to with him, dancing lazily around the lounge, when he was at home, permitted to live with us, but his favourite record was ‘(White Man) In Hammersmith Palais’ by The Clash, which he said was about him. Joe Strummer and Mick Jones had written that song about our dad! It was so cool.

  At some point, or perhaps gradually, I came to realise that this was not true, but I never thought that Dad was lying, not really, more that he was speaking figuratively. There used, after all, to be a reggae place called the Caribbean Club in Oxpens, between the college and the Westgate shopping centre, and often, Dad told us, he really was the only white man there.

  No, it wasn’t Dad, obviously, it was Mum who had the drive in our family, who made us all work hard at school. ‘If you don’t do better than your parents did, I’ll see myself as a complete failure,’ she told us often, a powerful, guilt-laden motivating tactic that was sadly ineffective.

  I never take the lift myself, even though it almost always is working. I always climb the stairs, ever since we saw that locum doctor a couple of years ago who told us to ‘Keep trying! You never know!’ I asked her if there was anything I should do about the low sperm motility. ‘You don’t smoke, you don’t drink, you don’t use anabolic steroids,’ she said. ‘And this is good, it’s all good.’ For a moment she looked at a loss, then her eyes seemed to alight on something on her computer screen, I assume it was our address, and she said, ‘You live in one of the towers? Which floor?’

  ‘The eighth,’ Alli told her.

  ‘Perfect!’ said the doctor, and she told me to always use the stairs. I would lose weight and get fitter and that would help with the depression, too, which to be fair it has.

  ***

  Anyhow, I carried on down the stairs (while Tosh climbed to his place on the eleventh floor, so he could get changed and go back down and out to the gym) and walked to the Blackbird to meet Benny. My brother had texted me, and said he’d bike over. He lives in a tower too, and there are only five in our little city, these three in the Leys (Windrush, Evenlode and ours), one on Wood Farm and the one over at Northway where Benny resides. (Six, I suppose, if you count Hockmore in Cowley, but it’s more of a block than a tower, isn’t it?) How’s that for a coincidence, eh? Although, come to think of it, neither of our other brothers lives in a tower. Lucy, our sister, does, but hers is one of those expensive private ones, all light and reflection. It’s up in Liverpool. The Dockside Development or some such. No, Benny and I are the only true failures in our family.

  I don’t drink. It interfered with the medication, back in the day, so I stopped and got out of the habit. Alli likes a glass of white wine and she also likes to smoke weed watching telly on a Friday night, and I might join her for a toke or two, but that’s about it. So I bought myself an orange juice and a pint of Guinness ready for Benny, since of course he was late as always. He claims that some of his buddies live on nothing but stout and smoke and he’s going that way himself but he still needs carbohydrate. Pasta, bread, spuds. Benny reckons that good beer’s got everything you need, almost. I’m amazed that he doesn’t fall off his bike more often, frankly, but the beer doesn’t seem to affect him any more (apart from the slurred speech, obviously). I’m bewildered, too, that he’s still so thin. Benny’s wiry, leanly muscled, he always was. You’d have thought all that beer would make him puffy or soggy but it hasn’t, except for his face.

  Benny came in breathing hard and sweating. We sat down and, before he could tell me what it was he wanted, I asked Benny if he thought that the Queen still had someone to warm her toilet seat for her. I said I’d been wondering about it again – did he remember how we discussed it years ago?

  Benny said he did not remember, and that I was a pillock. Perhaps the Queen had a humble toilet-seat warmer, perhaps she had not, once upon a time, like in a fairy tale, but this was 2016 and she certainly did not have one today. He said that to talk like that was disrespectful to Her Majesty, poor old dear.

  I said that actually, bro, it was 2018 now, in case he hadn’t noticed. It worried me that those lost weekends of his seemed to have become lost years. And I was surprised to see that he’d become a rabid monarchist in his middle age. I always thought he was a republican. When I was a teenager I’d hear my older brother say things like, ‘Them Russkies had the right idea, we should do with our lot what they done with the Romanovs.’

  Benny said, ‘Obvioushly, their toilet sheats will be warmed up automatic now, you plonker.’

  One of the nice things about seeing Benny is that we can use words from our childhood – like pillock and plonker – that you don’t hear much elsewhere. I had to agree he was probably right about the automation. It’s happening in all sorts of industries, after all. ‘I suppose the next advance,’ I said, ‘will be they’ll have robots to do it for them, and maybe those robots will be lifelike and resemble the Royal Household flunkeys of our childhood, and so restore the regal privilege and tradition of old.’

  I thought this was a pretty comical picture I’d painted, I don’t know about you. Benny just scowled like he couldn’t believe how stupid I was, spouting my usual nonsense, but just then one of his old pals, Dex, passed our table. He spotted Benny and they gave each other a kind of slurred alcoholic hug. Dex asked Benny what he was doing in our neck of the woods. Benny said he was visiting his brother here. Dex acknowledged me with a cursory nod. He dragged a chair over and sat down, saying, ‘I can’t stop.’ Great, I thought, that’s him here for the duration.

  ‘How’s Lucy?’ Dex asked. He’d always fancied our pretty sister. Everyone knew it, it was a bit of a standing joke, a running gag, the rough lad’s unrequited love for our stuck-up sister. ‘She weren’t doin too bad, were she?’ Dex came here from Manchester with his family a long time ago, he went
to school with Benny, down the road at Peers, but if you met him and he opened his mouth you’d think he arrived yesterday.

  Benny told Dex that Lucy was living in a plush apartment in a glass tower in Liverpool. Dex grimaced and said, ‘What’s a lovely bird like your sister go and do a stupid thing like that for? Fuckin Liverpool?’ He shook his head. ‘The only good thing to come out a Liverpool’s the M sixty fuckin two.’

  I couldn’t help laughing but Dex said, ‘It’s not funny, lad, it’s fuckin tragic.’

  Benny said it was great to see Dex, but he had to talk to his brother here about something. Dex took the hint and stood up. He shook hands with Benny and said, ‘Say hello to your sister from me.’ Then he pointed a crooked finger at me and added, ‘And that goes for you too, lad,’ making it sound like some kind of threat.

  I took a sip of orange juice. ‘What is it, bro?’ I asked Benny.

  ‘I’m a geniush,’ he said.

  ‘We all know that,’ I assured him. ‘But what do you want here, now, today?’

  ‘I’ve had me an idea,’ he said.

  ‘Oh no,’ I replied.

  ‘In the form of an offer.’ Benny smiled. ‘From me to you.’

  I was perplexed. There was nothing Benny had that I could possibly want. This is not an exaggeration. He owned the clothes he stood up in (or, at this moment, sat down in). He wore them every day, until they fell apart, frayed by his sharp elbows and bony knees, and then he went to the Animal Sanctuary shop where he tried on dead men’s clothes and haggled over the price with Alli or whoever else happened to be volunteering that day.

  ‘What kind of offer?’ I asked.

  In his one-bed council flat in Northway, Benny owned a broken sofa, a stained mattress, a number of empty cans he called ashtrays, ill-assorted pans and cutlery in the kitchen, and a toothbrush. He’d quite likely bought that second-hand.

  ‘What ish a man’s mosht preshious posheshion?’ Benny asked. He peered at me, grinning, and swaying slightly where he sat.

  ‘His honour?’ I ventured. ‘His memories? I could say his woman, bro, only unlike in all those country songs you love, women aren’t men’s possessions, are they? Not even in Nashville any more, I shouldn’t think.’

  ‘His sheed.’ Benny beamed at me. Or if not at me, exactly, at least in my general direction. ‘You shee?’ he said. ‘I’ll give you my shperm, brother. We’re practically the same DNA. Our genes are practically identical.’ I swear Benny’s eyes almost sparkled behind the dull sheen. ‘I would do that for you, brother. I’d come round when it’s the right time for Alli, in her shycle and all that, we’d have a quickie, it would mean nothing.’

  I stared at my brother, unable to think of anything to say.

  ‘I know what you’re going to shay, you bashtard,’ Benny said. ‘You’re going to shay I can’t get it up no more. But I can, brother, and I will for you, I promish.’

  Alli volunteers at the Animal Sanctuary shop on a Friday. Even though there’s a sign on the door that says WHEN SHOP IS CLOSED, PLEASE DO NOT LEAVE CONTRIBUTIONS OUTSIDE, almost every morning there are bags there, and often foxes or rats have ripped the bags open with their claws and had a look inside and scattered the contents across the pavement. Alli says that sometimes it’s not rats or foxes but human beings who go through the bags left outside the charity shop, taking what they want and leaving what they don’t want tossed about.

  Alli is often the one to sort through donations made by kind people – whether during the day or the night – and she tells me about them. When she started there, she was astounded. ‘You won’t believe it,’ she said. I imagined she was going to tell me about beautiful or precious or valuable objects, but no. ‘Lots of the clothes we get aren’t washed,’ Alli said.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. Dirty clothes. Even underwear!’

  ‘People donate their dirty underwear to a charity shop?’ I asked. Alli was quite right: I could not believe it. The charity also, she told me, receives food-encrusted kitchen utensils. They get broken toys. They get books whose pages are stuck together from rising damp.

  ‘Do people use the charity shop like a dump?’ I asked Alli. ‘Because it’s closer than the recycling centre at Redbridge?’

  Alli nodded, pensive. ‘People are strange,’ she said.

  All sorts of other, useful things are donated, including clothes in good condition, i.e. washed before being handed in. The Animal Sanctuary shop is the only charity shop on the Leys, which means not only that it’s a place to buy clothes at a reasonable price, it’s the only place to buy clothes. Templars Retail Park is a bit of a schlepp. A lot of the inhabitants of our tower buy their clothes in the Animal Sanctuary shop, and I’m impressed by the way people have their own look or style and even in a little charity shop find garments to suit them. Like the Tunisian woman, Mariem, who unearths bright-coloured dresses. Or Tarek, the Syrian, who’s always dressed in a suit with a white shirt, no tie, top button done up. Always. Tarek told me that the torturers pretend to hang their political prisoners, they string them up and after a period of intense pain and terror let them down again – apparently they find this amusing – and it’s why you’ll never see Tarek wear a tie.

  Then there’s Mido – who’s always smoking and in a hurry, since the day he arrived here. He’s probably organising and campaigning frantically among his fellow émigrés, lobbying our politicians and raising money, driven by ideals and anger and an exile’s guilt. Even now, or especially now, when things are worse than before the Arab Spring. Anyway, Mido wears a leather jacket over pullovers and grey trousers. The pullovers change colour but they always look the same, just right somehow, those of a committed revolutionary.

  How do I know these people get their clothes from the Animal Sanctuary shop? Because either Alli’s actually sold the items or she recognises them, and we’ll be coming out of the tower or walking along Cuddesdon Way to the park or going into the library, and she’ll squeeze my hand in a particular manner, I can’t even identify how, exactly, but I know it when I feel it, and after we’ve passed whoever was approaching us she’ll lean towards me and whisper in my ear, ‘Blouse.’ Or, ‘Skirt.’ Or, ‘Oxford United baseball cap.’ (That was Mariem the Tunisian woman’s husband, by the way.)

  The clothes that Alli notices for herself are handmade ones. Baby clothes. Knitted cardigans and booties and so forth, and she’ll buy them (at the price the manager sets, in case you were wondering; there’s no staff discount in the charity shop) and bring them home.

  ‘The trouble is,’ I said, ‘that we’re losing twice over. We’re losing the money you’re no longer earning on Fridays at the plant, and we’re also losing the money you spend on Fridays at the shop. Earn less, spend more: it’s a recipe for financial disaster.’

  But Alli understands my sense of humour. She knew I wasn’t really complaining. I was teasing. She continued with her sporadic purchases, and there’s a cardboard box in the second bedroom of our two-bedroom flat, which for the moment is where I work. Last week I realised that someone must have donated a large unopened pack of disposable nappies to the charity shop, because there was one in a second cardboard box on top of the first box in a corner of the room.

  Some days, when I’ve got no specific reason to go out, I walk up and down the stairs anyway. I descend to the ground floor then turn around and climb. I don’t stop at our eighth floor but carry on up to the top, fifteenth floor. Malcolm lives down on the third floor, and is (according to his claim) the only occupant of our tower who’s been here ever since it was opened in 1960. We sometimes chat on the stairs. He told me that for a period, in the late 1970s and early 80s, you could get on to the roof. On warm summer evenings a group of them would go up with a stereo and play reggae and drink beer and smoke spliffs. But then someone fell or jumped or was pushed off – Malcolm says he can’t remember – and the council secured the door. It’s a shame. I should think Alli and I might like to go up there and hang out; to have friends in the tower
to hang out with. It’s not like there’s any other socialising area.

  Anyway, I reach the fifteenth floor and turn around and go back down to our flat on the eighth. I sometimes do that twice a day. It makes a break from the translating work I do, which is very slow. My German isn’t great, to be honest, and because they’re technical manuals I often have to look up words that I wouldn’t know even if I was fluent. Last year I calculated that I earn less in an average week than Alli does on a good day, and she said, ‘You know what? After my maternity leave I’ll go back to work full-time and you can be a house husband.’

  ‘What we call in the tower a flat husband,’ I said.

  ‘An apartment husband,’ Alli said, chuckling.

  ‘A condominium husband,’ I said. ‘A husband who didn’t use a condom and is now a full-time father.’

  Alli gave me a kiss and I understood that she’d said that, about me looking after our future child, or children, to make me feel better about earning so little.

  As I was saying, I walk up and down the stairs, like the doctor advised. It’s efficient exercise – once I’ve done a complete loop I’m huffing and puffing, I can tell you – but it’s also nice to see a neighbour or two, to say hello, to wish them a good day.

  I have another habit that I enact for my own amusement but also, I hope, one that the recipients might enjoy: once I know where someone’s from, when we meet on the stairs I say hello to them in their own language. ‘Marhaban,’ I say to Mariem and her husband. I address Tarek formally, ‘As-salaam Alaikum,’ he’s such a serious man. And to Mido I say, ‘Keef halak?’ ‘Good, good,’ he says, hurrying along.

  Occasionally, if I’m feeling frivolous – and if I think the other person might not take it the wrong way – I’ll say hello in an entirely inappropriate language. ‘Buongiorno!’ I’ll say, but I do it dramatically, theatrically, so the other person knows (I hope) that I’m doing so on purpose, I’m being playful, and you’d be surprised how often they’ll respond in kind – ‘Ciao!’ – and we smile at each other as we pass.