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PSORIASIS

I’d always wondered what it was. Clock-clock-clock against the side of the door. Clock-clock-clock against the wood of the side of the door. They lived in the house at the top of Rose Hill, about a mile out of town, and I had to cycle to take them their groceries. To take their groceries to them. There were no other houses on the way. Just theirs, at the top. I would cycle round the corner, dump the bicycle on the verge, hoick the grocery bag over my shoulder and wheel the bike up the road. It never got any easier. The bicycle was an old one. The hill gave me vertigo. And all the while the weight of the bag reminded me where I was coming from and why I was coming from at all. It never got any easier. Never does, as far as I can tell.

I’d had a bad day. I’d got up late and had a bad day. It always happens like that. Stay up late, get up late, have a bad day. And it wasn’t going to get any better. Or easier, I could tell. The sun beat out of a large blue sky. My shirt clung like a starched sheet or a child. I put my head down and stared at the tarmac of the road. Grey pustules. I wanted to stop thinking, for the next twenty minutes to be erased from my life. To have arrived, to have delivered the groceries, to have received the money and to be already freewheeling back down despite the protests of the wheels. But the next twenty minutes, I knew, were a fact of my life. They didn’t need my mind to be present, my mind played no part except to register the fact the twenty minutes were a fact I was not enjoying. I went back to the grey pustules and thought of the rain in March. Grey rain in March, when the mistle thrush is grubbing for worms that cling to the soil. A gentle breeze eased the itching on my head. Whenever I got hot, I itched. On my nape, in the curve of my chest. Wherever the sweat had a chance to gather. My mother had told me it was psoriasis. I looked psoriasis up. It’s Greek for have the itch. I could have told her that. A disease of the skin. Which I thought was a bit harsh. Marked by dry reddish patches covered with scales. I didn’t have any scales. The doctor told me it was psoriasis and began to talk to my mother about paddy-diving in the Caribbean. It was a cold day outside and the heating at the surgery was on full blast and I started to itch. I don’t like doctors. I used to think they were infallible. Now I think they’ve read a book and passed an exam and basically don’t know much more than you or I, so they hide behind Greek words and illegible writing. If they were any good, they’d be surgeons. The breeze brought me the slight fragrance of grass. I could hear a car revving up down below me. I wanted it to be evening, for the cool to return.

I stopped the bike. Laid it down on its side like a horse. I lifted the strap of the grocery bag over my head and dumped the bag on the road. It sat there unmoved, slouched. Where I had dumped it in the middle of the road. I considered what to do. I was vaguely aware that I had rebelled. I had stopped pushing the bike and I had dumped the bag in the middle of the road. Was this the start of something or was it simply a pause, a rest?

I laid the carton of orange juice on its side, next to the bag, and stood back to contemplate. I could just put the carton back in the bag and continue up the hill. I reached for a box of eggs and placed it at right angles to the carton, so that the bag had a little tail. The afternoon did not move, overcome by its own inertia. I rummaged in the bag and found a pack of eight sausages. I wanted to remove the sausages from their wrapping and curl them away from the box of eggs like the smoke from a chimney drawn by a child. I stopped myself. That would be irreversible. I placed the sausages in their wrapping on top of the box of eggs. I had a carton on its side, a box at right angles and a pack of sausages on top of the box. I looked for some vegetables. I placed the paper bag of courgettes like a bouquet next to the monument to the sausages guarded by the orange juice. This was starting to be fun. As I thought this was starting to be fun, a stab of consciousness reminded me of my destination. I pulled out a plastic bag of chicken chow mein. It was semi-frozen and stuck to my hands. The cold was no relief because it stuck to my hands. I flung it to the grey pustules and pulled out in quick succession a newspaper, a tin of beans and a steak and kidney pie in a foil tin in a plastic wrapper. I added them to the circle I had begun, which now arched round to a quarter to. A quarter to the point directly above the bag. I jumped inside the clock and continued to pass things round the minutes. Loo roll. A tube of mustard. Two more steak and kidney pies in foil tins inside wrappers. A paper bag of mushrooms, a paper bag of baby carrots, a paper bag of peppers, green and red. Milk in a plastic bottle. Soon I had reached the point directly above the bag: o’clock.

The chow mein lay outside the circle. I counted the objects on its circumference and discovered there were fifteen. One for every two minutes. I walked back to the bag and emptied the remaining contents on to the road: a tub of yoghurt, bananas, bacon, fish fingers, cod steaks, cheese, butter, Fairy Liquid, potatoes, garlic, pasta, olive oil, salt, tea, cereal, coffee, sugar and oregano. I checked to see there was nothing left in the bag. I would have to remove three objects but which three?

She handed me a crisp twenty-pound note.

‘Keep the change.’

I looked at the face of my queen, then at some scientist, Michael something I couldn’t read. I calculated a personal profit of £1.44.

‘I’ll assume it’s all there.’

As she said this, she surveyed me quizzically and, bending at the knees, laid down the shears. I glanced over her shoulder in the direction of the doorway, which was cast in shade. I was waiting for the sound. I made out a sofa, a guitar, a plant. Taller plants lined the porch.

‘Do you want to come in?’ she asked, with motherly concern.

‘No,’ I said and smiled. My shirt flapped and billowed like a sail in the wind. The itching had gone.

THE TRAMP

The TV was on and I was watching it. He appeared next to me like a spirit. A rather wraithlike spirit. But then I suppose that’s what spirits are. He looked lost, as if he should have been in some procession of souls in torment and had got the time wrong. Wisps of moustache sprouted like copper wire or hay from his upper lip.

For a moment, I wondered if he might be my death I had been reading about. Except that my death was supposed to be on the left-hand side, and this figure was standing to my right. And also I did not have a moustache, wisps or otherwise. I had once tried to grow one at the age of eighteen, and had quickly realised my mistake (this is a lie; the mistake had been quickly pointed out to me).

Musing on whether my death was going to talk to me, I continued to watch the TV, my eyes flitting every now and then to the pint of Guinness sitting on the table in front of me. I had occupied my usual place, semi-obscured from view by the fruit machine directly at my back. I was happy here. I had a small table, with two chairs, one of which I occupied, the other to hold my coat and any eventual guest. There was nothing between me and the large television screen that hung from the wall. It was rather like having a box at the opera. I could see and not be seen, or be seen only indistinctly.

Now, however, I was finding it difficult to concentrate with as much enjoyment on the game. How jealous we are of our space! This man was doing nothing to me, he had not even addressed a word to me, and yet his mere presence in my field of perception was causing me a lack of ease. How strange it was to believe that our bodies ended where we could no longer see them! How easy it was to walk past someone without even noticing them, and yet with someone else the intervening space became so charged! And what of the occasions on which we have been caught looking in on someone, though we have been speechless and motionless ourselves, or our movement has not ceased to be smoothly fluent? Our bodies have tentacles like those of an octopus, and eyes in the back of the head.

The figure was now definitely alive, and lurched and leered like a drunk man. The figure was a drunk man.

‘What’s the score?’

My mind sighed. I replied in what must have seemed a distinctly uninviting manner,

‘0-0.’

Why was I being so cold? Had he not simply asked a reasonable question, a question I myself might have asked had I just arrived upon the scene? Was I so conditioned by appearance and accent and smell?

I pushed all these questions to one side, and brought forward the first swig of the pint in front of me. There was no drink like Guinness. My mother said it was a meal in itself.

The pub was half empty. When England played, the pub was full. ‘Come on, England!’ But no one cared too much about a game between Holland and the Czech Republic. I was there because I enjoyed my football, and because it was a Sunday and I had been working all day. I was tired and needed to relax, unwind.

‘What was the score between France and Denmark?’

The accent was slurred, but the facts were true. I marvelled at his grip on reality, and secretly compared it to my own.

‘France won 3-0.’

‘And Belgium and Sweden?’

This game was the inaugural game of the European Championships and had been played the night before.

‘2-1 to Belgium. They’ll have been pleased with that.’

He looked at me with the air of a schoolmaster who has just been patronised by a child. He wanted the answers. Not my opinion. I waited for him to ask about the third game that had already been played in the competition. He seemed to toy with me for a moment, drawing out the suspense before pouncing for the kill.

‘Italy… and Turkey?’

It was clear to me that he was a tramp. He was not just drunk, he was untidy. The flannel trousers, the scuffed jacket, the old pair of trainers, looked like the borrowings of another language, a language he did not own. He seemed to focus on the present only as a diversion from the past or from the cold. He saw me, and yet he saw straight through me to the barren ground projected by his soul. Everything was barren. You could pour a drink down him and it would give relief, but nothing would grow.

My thoughts and the conversation were interrupted by the barman, who was telling him he had to buy something if he wanted to stay. Before I could reach for my wallet, with a mixture of vacillation and shame, he had about-turned and was at the bar, ordering a pint of lager. He returned with the lager fizzing with excitement and asked the score.

‘Erm. 0-0.’

I was sure he did not recognise me. He had been absent for a minute perhaps and in sight of the screen. Nothing had happened to change the score.

‘And France and Denmark?’

I hesitated.

‘France won 3-0.’

There was no hint of humour or mockery in his voice. He seemed honestly to think I was someone else, or simply not to remember that I had ever been someone in the first place. I felt a rush of compassion, patronising if you like, but that I considered at the time to be sincere. I was determined to make it up to him. Make what up to him? I can only reply my earlier prejudice, and I resolved that the way to do this was by instigating some conversation myself.

‘And Belgium beat Sweden 2-1.’

He looked at me again with that air of a schoolmaster. Did I suppose him to be stupid perhaps? Did I think he had no memory? Had I not told him this only moments before? But already he had lost interest, and the words, before they were spoken, were old.

‘You told me that.’

The walls of my goodwill came tumbling down around me. I watched the game now in silence, chastised. I hadn’t the same appetite for drink as before.

Holland won that game 1-0. They were outplayed, but were awarded a penalty in the final minute of the game. The figure beside me did not stay, but left at the end of the first half. Nedved came close for the Czech Republic, and twice the Czechs hit the woodwork in the second half, but it was to no avail. Life, if it were no more than that, would be exceedingly unjust. I was pleased, however, because I had managed to relax and drunk a second pint of beer. I had not forgotten about the experience with the stranger, but I had put it to the back of my mind. When the referee blew the final whistle, I stood up, put on my coat, waved in the general direction of the bar and walked out into the failing daylight.

I had started heading downhill when my eyes were arrested by a terrible sight. The tramp, whom I had assumed no longer to be in the vicinity of the pub, was only a few yards away, standing in the middle of the pavement and facing the oncoming pedestrian traffic that issued from the railway station. It was too late for me to change direction, I was caught up in the flow of people, and, as I was carried along towards where he was standing, with the inevitability of driftwood borne on the current of a swollen river, I heard him mumble the words,

‘Spare any change, sir?’

I straightened up, adopting an air of urgency, but the tramp showed no signs of ever having recognised who I was.

Taken from Jonathan's unpublished book of short stories, Psoriasis

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Read some short stories translated into Bulgarian