I wake up at around three in the morning to the sound of voices from behind the house. I go to the study where the window’s open, it being a warm summer night. Tom, Nige and Kath are sitting out on Kath’s decking, facing the dark row of trees at the back of our houses.
Tom is singing the praises of brain implants. “I can’t wait to have one of ’em stuck in me ‘ead on the NHS. They’re designed so they sit right next to the pleasure centre in your brain. They give you this little control box and anytime you want a religious experience or an orgasm, you just press a button and it’s like the real thing: you don’t even have to leave your armchair.”
Nige laughs. “So, how’s that going to change your life, Tom? You spend most of the day in your armchair already, and you just press a little button on your TV remote control whenever you want vicarious experiences.”
“You’ve missed the point, pillock: these are real, virtual experiences not vicarious ones.”
“So, why stop there? You could have an implant that makes you think you’re virtually doing your garden or finishing the decorating you virtually started three years ago. It’ll be real to you but virtual to the rest of us.”
“I ain’t listening, Nige, because I know that you’re really a figment of my implant.”
Kath says, “Boys, let me get you another drink.”
“Tom doesn’t need one,” says Nige, “he can just activate his beer implant. So I’ll have his.”
I imagine that in Mediterranean countries, such late night neighbourly intercourse is fairly common, but not really in South East London, even in summer. We all get on pretty well here but mostly keep to ourselves. Usually, we stop short of a certain line which demarks the zone of family-like involvement. Which I think is interesting, because authors are almost duty bound to get their characters to step over that line.
Stepping over the line in real life can be painful. Kath, for instance, is a naturally kind-hearted woman, and probably stepped over the line a while back with old Bill, her neighbour on the other side.
Bill had lived in our street since moving there with his wife when still a young man. His house was actually two flats, above and below. After his wife’s death in the early eighties, he continued to live alone in the bottom flat, never even entering the one upstairs.
Bill’s survival was based on cheery stoicism, mixed with downright stubbornness. Basically, he resisted almost any offers of help. The day before he died at the age of ninety-two, he’d walked to the corner shop as usual to buy the day’s food. He didn’t believe in refrigerators and perhaps he was right not to, since the daily walk probably kept him fit and alive.
Several times Nige had offered to repair and decorate the upstairs flat for free, so that Bill could rent or sell it. But Bill always said no, that he didn’t need the money and especially didn’t want any stranger buggers living over his head.
Perhaps the peak example of Bill’s resistance occurred about five years back. Kath received a call from the hospital one evening to say they had Bill. Fearing the worst, she rushed there to find him recovering but confused as to what had happened. After speaking to doctors, it transpired that Bill had fallen into the Thames and rapidly been swept into mid-stream. Two young men drinking outside the Trafalgar Tavern in Greenwich saw an old man thrashing in the churning brown waters. They dived in and swam out to him where he tried to fight them off, insisting that he was all right and didn’t need their help.
Who knows, maybe Bill was resisting more life, too.
Bill did allow Kath to visit him most days, to check he was all right; and in later years she’d done quite a bit of cleaning and washing for him, too. Then one day she discovered what she’d always feared.
She told us Bill had quite a lot of money saved up, in addition to the value of the two flats. However, he hadn’t left a will. She’d tried to encourage him to make one on a few occasions, pointing out that since he didn’t have any family, the state would take everything when he died. Of course, he refused. Now, his flats have been empty for a year while solicitors work out the legal aspects of selling his estate. Apparently, the proceeds won’t go to the state, however, since a distant cousin has been traced.
Kath has never complained about Bill’s legacy. And I guess that says something about her and maybe something about the kind of person and the kind of community which exists in this part of the world, and about the various prices involved in crossing lines.
If Bill and Kath’s story was made into a novel or movie, I guess the author would have to make Kath bitter and plot to murder the distant relative when they turned up. Or go mad at what might have been. Plots have to contain a main character with a problem/issue that goes through a climax before it’s resolved. But, I don’t know, I sometimes wish we could write stories about decent folk who stumble about more or less doing the right thing without wanting anything back.
“I will finish the decorating,” says Tom, “I just ain’t got anyone to share the results of it with at the moment.”
Nige laughs. “Why don’t you ask out that Tracy Emin. I hear she’s pretty handy with a brush.”
“Nah,” says Tom, “she’s even lazier than me. Can’t even be bothered to make her bleedin’ bed.”
“Good at the old make do and mend, though,” says Nige. “Did you hear about the tent she made out of a load of her old boyfriends’ Y-fronts?”
I go back to bed, just as Kath says, “Is that because she needed a fly sheet . . . ”
Before sleeping, I wonder if Emin crossed a line, in putting her lovers’ names on public display like that. Well, of course she did. That’s what artists do. And writers. ‘Never tell a writer your secrets’, someone once said, who obviously had.