Observatory Mansions (6 page)

The Ormes had lived on this land for centuries. They lived
in a house not far from this park: when I was young the building called Observatory Mansions had a different name, it was called Tearsham Park. Tearsham Park was a large eighteenth-century building. There had been an older Tearsham Park, a sixteenth-century manor house, but this had been destroyed by fire. Many objects had been rescued from inside it, but the building itself had been lost for ever – its beams and oak floorboards had ignited so easily. The new Tearsham Park, built on exactly the same spot as its predecessor, was a large grey cube with a central courtyard and, unusually, an observatory built into a domed roof directly above the entrance hall.

When Tearsham Park became Observatory Mansions, the centre of what was once the courtyard became a lift shaft. In the remaining space of the courtyard, square passageways were constructed on each floor with stairs connecting them, all the way to the top. The original grand mahogany staircase and the back servants’ stairwell were both pulled out. Where windows had once looked into the courtyard were now doors around landings. The building was divided into twenty-four flats. The observatory, in shape though not in purpose, remained. I recalled large spacious rooms: the library, morning room, drawing room, smoking room, dining room. They had all been divided up, segmented by plasterboard. But I had remembered how it all was once. The park remembered. Father remembered too.

It was in this park, the reduced version, that my father had a stroke. People brought him home. His skin was lime-coloured. Ever after, one of his eyes drooped, the lower lid showed its pink inside. On that day Father was sitting on a bench observing the small part of park that he was once master of. He saw people, heard noise. He had a stroke and tipped off the side of his bench on to the ground.

Dogs and the Dog Woman
.

In the park worked the Dog Woman. The Dog Woman smelt of dogs, a smell like ammonia with a little vomit and urine and shit added in. The Dog Woman wore a dog’s collar around her neck and clothes (old, greasy) and was clothed with the hairs of dogs. She had many friends, all canine. Her clothes were ripped, as was the skin of her hands and thighs and ankles and breasts, by the clawing of dogs: memories of other times. Some were fresh, still blood-coloured, others were old, almost skin-coloured. Happy times, heavenly moments.

In the city there are many dogs. They have worked themselves into a social order, into different castes: those with collars and those without. The Dog Woman, greasy, matted hair like an old mongrel, breath smelling of a dustbin diet, loved all dogs without collars. Pissy knickers. Dribbly mouthed. Dog lover. She fed the dogs in Tearsham Park Gardens. In return they whined at her, scratched her, licked her, bit her. She fed them with disowned morsels; she, in an understanding with them, shared the same diet. She barked too, and growled, and rolled on the ground and sniffed under dogs’ tails.

She was the Dog Woman of Tearsham Park, loyal to her brood, huge and breasty like some great whelping bitch. That day I sat in the park, she wound her large-hipped, hairy way across the nearly beautiful angel of the beautiful girl that I had known for two years. The girl said nothing, immediately repaired her angel’s smudged and swollen-looking face, made her thin again.

The Dog Woman had another name – she was also called Twenty. Two names never to be written in a passport. She was also called Twenty because she lived in flat twenty of Observatory Mansions. A convenient kennel, so close to the park. It might be considered that Twenty would surely have
preferred to sleep outside with the dogs. But she chose not to, since she didn’t want to wake with one of her dog-friends pulling her insides out, since she needed somewhere to lick her wounds clean, to hide her bones.

We called her Twenty because she had declined to give her real name. She was, before the new resident of flat eighteen arrived, the Mansions’ most recent resident. She arrived during a storm, a rare day when all the dust in the city was peeled off the walls, off the streets, off the few trees, off the people too, and rushed, in chalky, ashy colours into the darkness of drains.

During that particular storm Twenty, the Dog Woman, climbed through an open window of one of the unoccupied flats on the ground floor of Observatory Mansions with her ailing dog, a pathetically thin Great Dane, its ribcage piercing through its scarred pelt. In the night, after many hours of sobs and groans, with one final spasm of its back legs, it died. It was a great, black, ugly corpse. It must have been a titan of a dog. A dog, Twenty’s companion, equal to her in size. The pair of them had got caught up in a fight, a dog fight, and running away from that fight the Great Dane had bounded into the roundabout traffic. And was hit. It was thrown from the corner of a car into the brick wall of Observatory Mansions, its hips smashed. And Twenty, more careful of the traffic, rushed over to stroke it during its final breaths and to carry it to our home.

Twenty buried her husband outside Observatory Mansions the next morning, under the hard, dusty earth where flower beds used to be. She pushed down her knickers and pissed over the grave. Twenty sniffed around the flats and chose flat twenty. Flat twenty, top floor, outside the lift that didn’t work, outside the lift that once worked and once worked so swiftly that it killed Mr Alec Magnitt and shattered Mr Alec Magnitt’s calculator (lot 737). But Twenty knew
none of this. Twenty used the stairs. Out of choice even though there was no other.

Twenty, Dog Woman, did not pay rent.

She had no reason to welcome a new resident either. Since the residents of Observatory Mansions were of the human kind, she detested them all. She loved only … dogs.

And for us Twenty was the perfect resident. She did not pay rent but that was no concern of ours. She kept herself to herself. Spent her days (and most of her nights) in the park.

That day in the park, I watched her lie down, belly sagging, on the patchy grass of Tearsham Park Gardens. She yawned, she placed her chin on the ground, wagged her bottom, closed her eyes.

A child’s toy
.

That day in the park I saw a child. I saw a mother carrying the child, way above the ground, way above child level, somewhere high up – mummy level. I saw the child’s hand gripped around a child’s toy. A lock of love. The object, before unimportant but then, suddenly, most notable, fell to the ground. The child screamed. The mother walked on, told the child to close its mouth, separated child from child’s toy for ever. I saw that object, once smothered with attention, now abandoned and lonely, another casualty of love.

So I stood up, approached, stopped, stooped, checked the object for unreasonable dirt, for child’s saliva and snot, for white cotton dirtying substances, for gloves’ enemies. Found none. Found the object most collectable. Found the object alone, childless, in need of a collector. And so, always friend of the friendless and quick as a magpie, I swiped it.

A child’s toy, rescued from the park’s floor, found a home in my pocket. A small metal Concorde aeroplane, with teeth marks around its cockpit, flaking off the paint, with one of its plastic wheels missing. Where would it fly to? Where was the
hangar? There was a little space, more than enough to land in (never to take off again). A plot. Labelled lot number nine hundred and eighty-six.

I didn’t go picking up every abandoned object, that has to be clear. Requirements must be met. The teeth marks around the cockpit, the missing wheel had given the object some history. Showed that it was loved. Marked it out as relevant.

So I rushed across the park, dodged the traffic and returned to the building signed:

OBSERVATORY MANSIONS
Spacious Apartments of Quality Design

Stepping into Observatory Mansions, cramped apartments of inferior design, I met a person.

A sphincter muscle named Porter
.

The man with many keys. The stoic. The Porter, busy about his cleaning business, busy trying to kill all dust, busy breaking his heart. He saw me but made no greeting. Not even a hiss. As I passed him he turned his back to me, walked out to where I came in and re-entered the building, crawling forward with his dustpan and brush, rubbing out my footsteps. The keys jangled. The teeth of his brush scrubbed the grey, faded carpet that was once blue. The dirt and dust of the city had added its own colour, but first the Porter scrubbed out the blue, cleaned it away, swept it up. In this manner he tidied away all colours. He broke everything down to a ubiquitous grey. He would have preferred white. But white was not possible. White does not last. White, he wondered – probably – are you a myth?

I held the colour white in my hands, my gloves, but the Porter thought: Whiteness has gone from the city. He thought, it packed its bags years ago, leaving behind one, sad,
orphaned boy, orphaned by cleanliness, who climbed the stairs every day, Sisyphus like, with his dustpan and brush, leaving a trail of only slightly cleaner carpet behind him, like the antithesis of a snail.
Be not like the slimy snail and leave behind a litter trail –
those were the first words he said to me.

But for a long time I had not heard the Porter speak – the last time he broke out of his word-fast was during his attempt to expel Twenty from twenty. Two years before. She paid no rent. She bit him.

The Porter lived below us. In the centre of the dirt, in the basement. Amidst the dust and dirt was an oasis, amidst the dust and dirt was a three-roomed cage of undiluted tidiness. I saw it once. I came down to inform him that the Mansions had again been burgled. I came to inform him that this time the burglars had not got so very far. As far as the entrance hall, as far as the cupboard in the entrance hall. The cleaning cupboard where the vacuum cleaner was kept. It’s gone, I said. Stolen. No one can afford to replace it, I said. With a smile.

The Porter used to help me clean Father once a week. But once, the last time, while we were lifting Father from his red leather chair on to a neighbouring pine chair, a single drop of spittle fell from Father’s mouth and found temporary lodging on the Porter’s right cheek. The Porter dropped Father. Father fell on the floor. The Porter scrubbed his cheek.
He never cleaned Father again. He never vacuumed again
. I took the vacuum cleaner. No fingerprints were to be found on it. I wore gloves. White cotton gloves.

The vacuum cleaner has gone – I said. Stolen – I said. Translation: Your best friend … is deceased (lot 802). And then, in that moment of vulnerability, I saw what no one else had ever seen before: the Porter’s flat. As the Porter rushed up to the entrance hall, leaving his flat door open, I went inside and found …

The three-roomed cage of undiluted tidiness that had declared enforced exile on cockroaches, slugs, flies, spiders, moths, silverfish, ants, bats, mice, rats and intimate ephemera. Though, under the bed, away from light and vision, was a trunk. The trunk was secured by four latches and two large padlocks. What was entombed inside it? I made a guess: nonregulation togs, untyped dispatches, extra-curricular manuals and photographic portraits – in short, collections from an average human life. Of the Porter before he became a porter, of a man who once had a name before he became a job. The trunk had a dual purpose: first for suffocating fragments of biography, the second for providing extra firmness to the already hard mattress above.

There was a bathroom. I do not suppose the bath had ever been used. That is not to say that the Porter did not ever wash himself. The clue is in the shower head that leered authoritatively down at the hot and cold taps as if they were filthy children. The bath, I imagine, was considered by the Porter an instrument of sloppiness and relaxation. Washing of a vigorous nature could never be accomplished in such a construction. In a bath one lies in one’s own dirt. The shower, on the other hand, positively rips grime off and sends it promptly through the plughole into oblivion.

Directly above the lavatory tank was, curiously, a mirror where the Porter must have watched his face while he urinated, or perhaps porters call the action micturition. Through the mirror the Porter saw his face. And in that face he must have seen a time before porterdom, he must have seen a childhood, perhaps toys. Perhaps even some happiness. On that face were marks. Marks that stepped over each other. Marks all over. Pinpricks of imperfection.

The Porter had ginger freckles.

They obscured his face completely. Untidy groups distorted the precision of his nose, his cheekbones, his eyelids. He had been scrubbing for over fifty years and still they
hadn’t come off. They made him look childish. It was as if his body insisted on retaining the semblance of a child until he stopped being a porter and became one final, happy day a person. A porterless person. A person person.

Porter was his name: porter, beside being the name given to gatekeepers or doorkeepers or caretakers, is also the title of the pyloric opening in the stomach. The pylorus is terminated by the porter, a strong sphincter muscle, which connects the stomach to the duodenum, safely allowing the journey of food to progress down the alimentary canal. This ring of muscle decides when to allow the passage of food to progress or when to constrict its access completely. A condition known as pyloric stenosis occurs when the muscle tightens and refuses to allow anything to pass. This causes repeated vomiting, sometimes of food eaten twenty-four hours previously, and generates alkalosis – when there is too great a quantity of alkalines in the body. If this muscle refuses to relax surgery, known as a pyloromyotomy, is necessary to unbolt the gate by force.

The Porter, muscle not man, may refuse to open, thereby stopping the breakdown, expulsion and digestion of food, and hold the entire body in check to calamitous outcomes.

The Porter, man not muscle, oversaw the expulsion of dirt that lay in the body of Observatory Mansions. We left our full dustbin bags outside our flat doors every night, the Porter removed them every morning. And the Porter expelled, with the exception of Twenty, any intruders who happened upon Observatory Mansions, particularly the adolescent boys who sometimes crept through the broken windows of the ground-floor flats to smoke cigarettes, drink cans of beer and examine magazines filled with naked women.