Nikita, Dave and David
by Wilson Neate
I had undertaken employment in the menswear department at Fenwick’s in the Brent Cross Shopping Centre. My co-workers and I considered our positions there to be interim engagements. We, of course, didn’t need these jobs. They were beneath us. We were just biding our time until we moved on to the greater things we envisaged for ourselves. We were going places. Eventually.
I spent my days playing Mr. Humphries to Ioan Strawbridge’s Captain Peacock. Ioan Strawbridge really was going places, though: four years later, he’d be a bona fide Captain, or more accurately a Flight Lieutenant, piloting his Tornado over Iraq. The rest of us barely achieved take-off. To this day, a few are still taxiing amid the coats and jackets, the knitwear, nightwear and loungewear, the shirts and trousers, the underwear and socks; still making plans in miserable, claustrophobic digs dotted around the North Circular. I could have been one of them, doomed to walk the floors at Fenwick’s by day, to plan a rapidly disappearing future by night, in my modest rented room at 47 Gloucester Gardens.
***
Sullen and detached, the house stood set back from the quiet street, glowering out at NW11. Bay windows, gables, half-timbers and rough-cast plastering endowed the structure with a distinctive, desirable mock Tudor countenance. That countenance was now ravaged by a virulent late 20th century pox, its façade disfigured and scarred by the attentions of unsavoury, unscrupulous callers. A scourge of crooked tradesman, a posse of suburban cowboys, a rash of botchers had all visited in recent years, contracted for jobs both major and minor: painting, glazing and lighting, roofing and guttering, additions and extensions, projects that were often ill-conceived and inappropriate, poorly executed and fudged, unfinished and abandoned.
The once enviable front garden lay entombed beneath an inexpertly poured concrete carpet. A brutal grey mantle of suburban disintegration and blight, it compounded the shame of the already despoiled house: pock-marked, pitted and uneven, fissured and rhizome-cracked, strewn with the decaying or desiccated innards of breached, upturned bins, discoloured by automotive leakage and seepage.
To this, add the leavings of dogs whose late-evening walkers, taking advantage of broken security lights, encouraged their canine charges to unburden themselves of both solid and fluid, only to supplement these deposits with their own stealthy micturition. And following suit in the smaller hours, streams of weaving revellers, perambulators on the lash, nocturnal pilgrims of the piss-up also tarried there: survivors of festive occasions, club and party refugees, turfed-out denizens of local watering holes. Wending their ways home, all of the above would relieve bladder or stomach at this convenient latrine.
By the mid-1980s, the property owner, an eccentric French minor aristocrat, hadn’t only sabotaged her home’s kerb appeal. She had also seen to the defilement of the interior, hacking and chopping the once grand family residence into a bedsitter warren that reeked of desperation and feline urine, although no cat had ever been seen alive on the premises. With the flats rented out, she occupied the entirety of the ground floor in her capacity as resident landlady.
An emaciated marble effigy shrouded in permanent black, she would have passed muster as an ageing Goth. Yet she had favoured that funereal look since the late 1950s. She betrayed scant signs of life, her unsettling presence suggesting premature taxidermy. Affectless in expression and unable to turn her head, presumably owing to the excision of all pertinent neck musculature, she carried her arms frozen at her sides, perhaps sutured or stapled in place. She had retained the capacity to speak, albeit in barely audible, heavily accented tones, exclusively on the matter of rent and the prompt payment thereof.
Trailed by a clinically depressed greyhound named Poncin, she traversed the penumbric interiors of her domain scarcely engaging her lower limbs, gliding as if on a set of wheels operated by some remote, occult hand.
She was not known to venture beyond the front door. But she did entertain company, after a fashion. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings at seven o’clock, a score of picturesque gong-bearing guests would gather in her living room. Seated cross-legged on the carpet at the centre of this weird convocation, the greyhound Sphinx-like at her side, she would lead protracted sessions of ritualized, rhythmic chanting. Relentless mantric meditations on wealth and prosperity, unremitting invocational visualizations of acquisition, these were Steve Reich pieces reimagined by the inmates of an institution for the financially disturbed.
I know just one detail of her previous life. Although she maintained an anonymous existence, largely adrift from the outside world, she had once made a fleeting appearance at the very centre of global history. Seeking to a promote positive image to counter the unfavourable press garnered by its interventions in Eastern Europe, in 1958 the Soviet Union had hosted the inaugural Tchaikovsky International Piano Contest – a project more palatable than the launch of Laika to her death on Sputnik II the previous year. So it was that in April 1958, in the frozen depths of the Cold War, the 22-year-old future landlady had travelled to Moscow to represent France at this prestigious event.
During the competition, presided over by Dmitri Shostakovich, she met Nikita Khrushchev himself, by whom she was harassed (via a Presidium translator) during an official reception. “If you do not win our little competition,” the prime minister had whispered, wineglass in hand, “you will surely win a Russian husband,” a moment captured on silent newsreel footage.
She exited the contest in the early rounds after her disappointing execution of an exigent Rachmaninoff piece, but would later wed one of the Russian entrants. Khrushchev was only partially correct, though. The couple had already met, two years earlier at the Franz Liszt Competition in Budapest, just weeks before the Red Army crushed the Hungarian Uprising.
Far from 1950s Moscow, this now former spouse of an internationally renowned Soviet-era concert pianist, once an acclaimed performer herself, had severed all ties with the past. Her Steinway, an item of bulky, useless living-room furniture, brooded dust-caked and junk-piled in the living room, a long-mute witness to the only musical performances to emanate from the house, those thrice-weekly ceremonies of financial self-actualization. Long gone, too, were the likes of Shostakovich, Khrushchev, Van Cliburn and Lazar Berman, all replaced by a very different breed of men: her tenants, a collection of unremarkable, unprepossessing English bachelors.
***
The unofficial head of household – self-appointed, as the longest serving resident – went by the name of Dave Brookes. A Polaroid photograph was fixed to the outside of his door with yellowing Sellotape. The aesthetic of the image fell somewhere between crime scene and DIY pornography. Its subject was a comatose (possibly deceased), overweight, forty-something male, forensically illuminated from distended abdomen to sweaty florid face by an unforgiving, merciless flash cube. His body was slumped, half-consumed by a derelict, distressed settee, his girth straining the seams of a grubby sharkskin suit-jacket, his broken black-framed glasses askew, chins legion and maw chasmic, his balding head of corkscrew clown-frizz thrown back against a palimpsest of wretched wallpaper.
Doubtless exploiting this man’s unfortunate state, an individual or individuals unknown had applied, with no little enthusiasm and relish, a freakish mask of eye-shadow, rouge and lipstick. An anatomically implausible rendering of an erect penis had been felt-tipped across a spider-veined cheek, the hideous member’s meaty head nudging the corner of his drooling mouth, as if seeking entry there. And, on his chest, his tormentors had placed a rectangle of soiled cardboard, inscribed with wobbly block lettering that proclaimed SEXY OF GOLDERS GREEN. This was Dave Brookes, my neighbour.
Most evenings, wrecked middle-aged men and glue-sniffing teenaged lads would cram into Dave Brookes’ squalid billet bearing plastic bags loaded with lager. There, they would smoke, drink and engage in banter, mostly concerned with Arsenal, West Ham and wanking, becoming louder, more obscene, more aggressive and more nonsensical with each passing six-pack. Their favourite word was ballbag, shouted as a term of affectionate abuse.
One evening as they were in full flight and I was attempting to read an improving book, an explosion of invective and jeering announced that Dave Brookes’ door had opened, loosing one of his cronies into the corridor. Then came a knocking. It was Dave Brookes himself. Can of Fosters and cigarette in his mammoth, bloated right hand, his expression unreadable, he asked if I’d mind keeping it down a bit, mate. Without waiting for an answer, he repositioned his glasses with a wurst digit, waddled down the passage and manoeuvred his 300lb frame into the cupboard-lavatory conversion.
The nature of Dave Brookes’ employment remained obscure, but he did spend several hours each day feeding coins into a payphone on the wall opposite my room, giving elliptical instructions seemingly related to unidentified merchandise and its delivery. Business interests aside, he oversaw the greyhound’s daily exercise regime. Every morning and evening, squeezed into his shiny suit, he would drag Poncin around the quiet neighbourhood, berating the animal for dawdling or insubordination. He had no French and, at intervals, the irate Estuary roar of PONCIN’! would be heard as he implored and bullied the greyhound, his exhortations fading as they moved further away from the house at the start of their circuit and increasing in volume as they drew closer on their return.
***
Another Dave, David Featherstone, occupied the room facing the toilet. There was nothing about his outward appearance that caused concern. Like Dave Brookes he was aged somewhere between 40 and 60. Unlike Dave Brookes he had more than a passing familiarity with the concept of personal hygiene. He used a comb. He patronised a local launderette. He owned several sweaters that he wore with dress shirts. His footwear was orthopaedic. He was gainfully employed at a nearby Job Centre.
The world of David Featherstone revolved around the payphone. He placed the same call each evening at eight o’clock, shoulder pressed to the wall, down which he would gradually slide over the ensuing fifteen minutes, defeated and diminished by the conversation, to which his contribution was never more than a litany of apologies for unnamed transgressions, of abject pleading and self-flagellation. Yeah, you’re right. Sorry. Yeah, I know. Sorry, love. Yeah. I shoulda. You’re right, love. I know. Sorry about that. Sorry. I know I am. Yeah, I know. Sorry. I’ll try. Yeah, love, I know I always do. Don’t be angry, love. I know you are, love. Sorry. Yeah, I will. Sorry. I’ll try. Yeah, I know I always say that, love. Don’t be angry, love. Sorry. His interlocutor would hang up after a few minutes of this, he’d call back and the exchange would begin again, and end almost immediately. This pitiful cycle would continue to play out until he’d exhausted his pile of coins. Even with doors closed, his co-tenants on the corridor were privy to these pathetic rituals of remorse and abasement.
On those rare evenings when SEXY OF GOLDERS GREEN wasn’t receiving his coterie of derelicts, the self-degrading recitation having run its course, Dave Brookes would manhandle a deflated David Featherstone into his insalubrious quarters. For a couple of drinks. For a quick chat. For guidance on the subject of relationships. For a few words of advice concerning the fair sex, you fucking ballbag. It never ended well. Around midnight, the door would crash open and, pursued by the cackling and coughing of his host, David Featherstone would stumble forth in a pall of cigarette smoke to ricochet in slow motion down the passage toward his room.
On one memorable occasion he stopped en route to awaken the household with heaving waves of spasmic bellowing, as the gears of his digestive motor stuck in reverse, locking him into a calvary of violent emesis. A barely legible note pinned to the lavatory door the next morning informed all residents that the toilet was out of order and not to be used under any circumstances. I encountered David Featherstone the following afternoon. He was feeling his way along the corridor towards to the phone, hunched, bowed, hobbling, like the victim of some terrible beating. He managed to raise his head in an almost imperceptible gesture of acknowledgement, revealing an ashen visage collapsed in on itself.
He began to talk into the receiver, voice transformed in a manner suggesting that his oral cavity had been stripped of those components necessary for enunciation and articulation, his words slithering out as if Vaseline-coated, distorted by a grotesque sucking lisp.
Nevertheless, I was able to decipher. It’s me. I know, love. Don’t be angry. I know I sound funny. Sorry. I shoulda let you know. Don’t be angry, love. Yeah, sorry you was waiting around for nothing. I couldn’t make it. Don’t get angry. Yeah, I know. I shoulda. I couldn’t. Please, listen. Yeah, I know, love. Sorry. Look, I just couldn’t come. I’ve got a good reason. Listen, love. Don’t be angry. See, I was poorly last night. In the loo, you know. Poorly. Well, yeah, sick. Yeah, I know that’s not nice to hear. Yeah, I know you don’t. Sorry. I understand, love. Thing is, I lost me teeth. Down the toilet. Top and bottom sets. Don’t be angry. I couldn’t go to a restaurant like that, could I? Yeah, I know. It was me own fault. I just wanted to tell you that I tried everything to get ’em out. Sorry. Yeah, I get that you don’t wanna know all this. Yeah, I know love. I tried but, listen, they’re stuck ’round the U-bend. Yeah, I know. Don’t get angry. Sorry. But I tried everything to get ’em out. Please, love. Listen. I tried reaching round the U-bend with the loo brush, holding the brush-end and using the handle but it, like, snapped off. You’d think they’d be stronger than that, wouldn’t you? Yeah, I know you don’t. Sorry, love. But the brush is sorta wedged down there now. I must’ve pushed it too far. I tried using a coat hanger to get it out but that didn’t work. I shoulda tried that first, to get me teeth. Thing is, I reckon I broke the toilet. Sorry. Dave Brookes tried to help. That was nice of ’im, wasn’t it? You still there, love? Hello? Love?
***
I began to harbour concerns that, were I to remain in this house much longer, I stood to become one of these men, one of their sad number. Furthermore, I sensed that things would end badly. Possibly quite soon. I resigned my position in menswear, broke my lease, forfeited my deposit and moved out. I left London and, in turn, the country.
Out of morbid interest, and at a safe distance of 6,000 miles, I kept tabs on Dave Brookes and David Featherstone. They would continue to inhabit their respective rooms for another quarter-of-a-century.
In the summer of 2010, their landlady, flying in the face of precedent, actually left the house and travelled to the Isle of Wight. Her reasons for undertaking this journey are now irrecoverably lost to history. It’s possible that she was attending a retreat for seekers of spiritual and financial abundance. Or perhaps she’d decided simply to take a vacation, improbable as that scenario may be. All I can say with certainty is that in the town of Ryde, on the second day of Cowes Week, she succumbed to a massive cerebrovascular accident. She left no family, only tenants.
Dave Brookes, David Featherstone and their fellow renters at 47 Gloucester Gardens received eviction notices in short order and the house was quickly acquired by a developer. In the process of extensive refurbishment and remodelling, the object of which was to convert the property into luxury flats, the aged plumbing system was disembowelled and cast into a skip in the cement garden. While emptying another wheelbarrow of debris on top of the shattered porcelain and lengths of antique piping that lay scattered around the bed of the giant steel bin, a builder glimpsed, nestled in the wreckage, what appeared to be a partial set of dentures.
Wilson Neate is an Anglo-Irish immigrant living in California. His books include Pink Flag (Bloomsbury) and Read & Burn (Jawbone). He has fiction in Faultline Journal of Arts and Letters and The Brussels Review and forthcoming in Always Crashing. His interviews, profiles and reviews covering literature, music and film have appeared in various magazines, including Publishers Weekly (Críticas), The Quietus, Blurt, Amplifier and PopMatters.