The Pitcairn Perspectives by Philip Spires - HTML preview

Edward Pitcairn’s blog

 

It is now over five weeks since that diagnosis and I am still here, here to write another entry in that blog I promised I would never start. The last was supposed to be the last… Of course it was, or wasn’t, was it? Why would you talk to yourself when there are other people? At least that’s what I used to say to myself. But that was before I began referring to myself in a past tense that is easier to write than speak. It always seems easier to put words on paper than breathe them, especially now.

The tiredness is taking over. It’s not predictable, that is what is so frustrating. I can feel as fit as a fiddle and start doing something, but a few minutes later I have not even the energy to stand. Once it hits, it takes a long time to subside and only if I condescend to sleep. And it is tiredness of a kind I have not known before now. It’s not just a lack of energy, but more like a lack of will. If only I could persuade my body to move, my brain tells me, everything would be fine. But then, when I persuade my mind to do the talking, nothing, it seems, wants to move when the message is sent. I can consciously tell a limb to move, but it only sometimes listens. And, when it’s deaf, its dead weight is appropriately adjectivally qualified. I presume when the end comes, my mind will simply not understand what is being done to it. It will protest, but to no avail because I will not know whom to address, except myself, who won’t be listening. By the time I perceive the reality, reality will already have taken over. Only surprise will be left. It will come as a surprise that will never be felt, let alone interpreted. By the time I will have asked the question, there will be no time left to answer it. I suppose.

I seem to have changed profession. The archaeologist in me now seems fossilized, animation suspended to permanent static posterity, achievements being etched in granite like some organically developing tombstone as yet not uncovered. I wonder if anyone sees their own gravestone? What must life have been like for those ancient kings whose death monuments were being constructed throughout their lives? Goodness knows I’ve visited enough of them, from pyramids to barrows, from a Michelangelo chapel to a Bernini tomb, from Ming mineshafts to Tang pits. Fancy a visit to your own inanimate future? And what would they have said when they were told the work was finished? Goodbye? Bon voyage.

Anyway, I’m going for the furnace. I don’t want anyone in a thousand years coming to dig me up, reassemble me and invent some flight of fancy about how I might have lived, how I might have survived both Covid and climate change, only to succumb to some natural demise. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, no mention of putrescence there. Product, not process. Ashes are the input, not the output. A flaming fire for me. Actually, it’s probably just an electric arc furnace. An industrial age…

But when? Next week? The week after? It’s not as if this is news. Since the day I saw my first dead fly, I have known that I was going to die. There is a hundred per cent chance that life will end in death, the only question is when. Though I know the process is nearing its end, I still have no real idea about the when. So much for knowledge. When certainty arrives, it merely confirms its lack of focus. I know we live in a probabilistic universe, and I appreciate that the probability of my death is one, pure certainty. But we do have to ask the right question. Whether is not at issue. The real question is when. At any particular moment, we have an expected probability of being harvested that is easy to compute. Just divide the current deaths per day by the total number of beings on the planet, and you have it. Much good it does you. At each instant, however, the experienced probability of dying is zero, otherwise you wouldn’t be around to calculate it! It was Gemma who, after reading my prognosis, said a week, and then another and then another… How right she was. If I might continue to apply Zeno’s technique, I might just go on for ever. But I hear my mathematician colleagues remind me that the series that is Zeno’s Paradox sums to infinity, and an infinity that is quite close by… I suppose the end product is an infinitely stretched time, the tortoise stuck to the spot with Achilles frozen in the process of not quite ever overtaking. Personally, I never wanted to be either the tortoise or Achilles, but the image does resemble what happens to light, at least in theory, on the boundary of a black hole. I suppose that’s just another name for the eventual condition we approach, a timeless stasis.

But I never anticipated becoming a detective, an amateur sleuth to mimic one of those unbearably haughty dames like Miss Marple, who blunder through everyone else’s wisdom with a vision driven by their own ignorance, punctuated only by their feigned surprise at their always unexpected achievements. And they do succeed, always succeed in appealing, if predictable ways. Whereas I will only mark time, probably, until it stops, and then, no doubt, with me out of the way and unable to defend myself, my legacy will be systematically dismantled by those who have always tended to agree with me thus far. It amazes me how soon respect is evaporated by absence.

I have spent so much time in my unproductive imaginings… I have also taken to riding on buses. No one else wants to, it seems. Well, just at this moment anyway. Everyone is afraid of becoming infected. Everyone has to wear a mask. Everyone has to be socially distanced. In Britain, it seems, there are very few people called everyone, because the buses I have used were close to empty and generally the only person in a mask was me. I have spent the last three days on buses. And I have no symptoms, so I must be all right.

So, it’s buses to the rescue! A 29 takes me to Trafalgar Square. You would have thought an archaeologist would want the museum, but for me it is the gallery I crave. One is British the other National, the museum and the gallery, that is. It has never failed to interest me why the world of objects in history is British, but the world of painting and art is National. I have no energy to tramp the rooms, obviously, so I select one, get there somehow and sit. The seat in the middle allows me to face different walls every few minutes, and focus on one painting, until some punter obscures it, and then I move my gaze. Each time I socially distance, hand cleanse, offer my name and landline - I don’t have a UK mobile anymore - so I can’t be tracked and traced, only called from the computerised contact list I append at the entrance. I could give the number of Gem’s second phone, her ‘old one’ that she insists I carry around with me, ‘just in case’, though in case of what I don’t know. I might, after all, drop dead, and then I wouldn’t be able to call her anyway, would I, darling? But at the gallery, what would be the point of registering the number of a phone that wasn’t even mine? If a ping came through, it would be Gem who would be identified with it, not me. Perhaps that would be a good wheeze in a pandemic, for everyone to use someone else’s phone and then go risky. Get them infected! Or at least socially infected, because the virus would be with someone else!

I used to have a UK mobile, but it didn’t ever seem to want to work in the middle of the Sava Sea, and when it did, it charged me a fortune because I was roaming. I tried to tell it that, in fact, I was standing still, but it still cost the same. Ditched. Useless. So, I got an Indonesian phone and a new contract. I was being bright, I thought, but on Sawu it still says I’m roaming, because I am too far from home, tough it doesn’t specify whether the home is mine or the company’s. And this in spite of the fact that my colleague on the site is part-owner of the company! And, of course, it’s useless in the UK, where I am again roaming, it tells me. The call from Heathrow to Gem cost the same as eating for a month. So here I am, proudly ditching all my phones. Don’t need one. Except now, I seem to need one again. At least they still let me on the bus, though I think they shouldn’t. They might catch cancer. The gallery let me in as well, just a name and a phone number, that same landline we have had in that house, save for a prefix change, since Penny and I moved in with the toddling Gem, the beautiful, sweet, curious Gemma. It’s such a shame that school ruins children before life does.

And then, after my hour in the gallery, I can get that London institution, the number 11, which will show me the sights of Westminster and West London all the way to Fulham, and then the sights of the east when I get the same bus back to the end of the line at Liverpool Street. I succumb to the tube there, around the loop to Kings Cross then the Victoria line home. It’s a trip that now shortens people’s lives by virtue, if that be the term, of exposure to air pollution. If questioned, I might claim it doesn’t apply to me, since I have more immediate, perhaps even shorter-term concerns.

I did something different a couple of days ago and it took me a day to recover. It was designed to be a follow up on the previous escapade, the one that finished at Angel tube pursuing an acquaintance as he descended into the darkness. And then catching him out by virtue of a doorman’s innocent revelations.

I decided to cut out the negotiation and went straight to the Angel by bus, expecting our friend to appear at that same building. Given that, according to the advertised clockwork of his life, he leaves the house at a quarter to eight, one would expect him to appear at that great junction fifteen minutes later, at the latest. That morning, he did not. He did not access that office ‘just for mail collection’ and neither did he take the Northern Line.

I waited until eight thirty and then rang home, using Gem’s ‘old one’, selecting the entry HOME from the contact list. I must ask her why it’s in capitals. I knew he was there the previous evening, because that had been one of Gem’s ‘man events’, when Geoff Sullivan was in his masculine attendance, and so he would still be around the next morning, this morning. Gem was always keen on sex. She was barely sixteen when the boyfriend got chased out of the house by Penny at five in the afternoon, just after school when she came home unexpectedly, and found the two of them at it on the stairs. They had never even made it as far as the bedroom. Good on her. Life comes around just once. The trick is not to make any decisions! There was no answer from HOME.

But last night, being a ‘man night’ meant that this morning was a ‘man morning’ and Geoff Sullivan, if that name be anything to do with what other people call him, would have left the house at his habitual seven forty-five and, if habit were any guide, he would have already tramped down Upper Street. Why did he never take the tube from Highbury? It makes no sense, because where could he go from Angel that he could not access from Kings Cross? I had assumed he would walk every morning as far as his mailing address, at least he would if there was any truth in his stories. But that morning he was nowhere to be seen.

I waited until ten. I was on the point of heading home, or perhaps back to that caff for a bacon sandwich, and then I thought, “Sod it!” Now “Sod it!” is a very good thing to think if you don’t know what you are doing. It has an air of the decision being made, the course being set. Like most states of surety, it’s close to delusion, but for me it worked this time.

I crossed Theobald’s Road to the opposite corner and took a few steps along St John Street to access the entrance to that large building into which he had disappeared last time, the one that has the ‘mailing address’.

“I’ve come to see Geoff Sullivan”, I said confidently to the security guard.

He looked at me rather strangely. It was the same fellow as last time, so possibly there was recognition at work. As fast as I could, I ran through his imagined responses to see if I might create a follow-up for each one. There might be several possible responses. “I’ll see if he’s in” might be one. “Who is calling?” or even “What name is it?” might have been others. But “We don’t have a Geoff Sullivan in the building” rather stumped me.

“I was here last week when he came into this building. I saw him leave. I asked you what he was doing, and you told me he comes here to pick up his mail.”

Recognition swept like a storm tide across the face. “Oh him. No idea what his name is. Just picks up mail.”

“But it’s his office…”

“I don’t think I said that, Sir. I am not authorized to divulge the names of the occupiers of our suites. A request like that has to be addressed to the management.” He moved to one side, partially blocking my further advance into the foyer, effectively showing me the door. I told him that I knew where it was. It always concerns me how complete loyalty can be bought for such a small salary.

In a flash of inspiration, I uttered my coup de grace. “So, you let people in here without checking their identity? Is that correct? The man comes through the door. He accesses an office and collects mail which he takes out of the building. He does all of that without the security guard even knowing his name…?” Clearly not true.

“Anyone with a pass gets in, Sir. No pass, no entry.”

“So, the man I am talking about has a pass?”

“I am not authorized to divulge information about the clients who rent space without their permission or authority from the management.”

“And precisely who is the management? How do I contact them?”

He answered the question that I wanted to ask, not the one I had spoken. “I cannot take messages, Sir. Please locate the building on the internet and communicate via the contact page.”

He took another small step to his left, further blocking any route past him.

“Now if you wouldn’t mind, Sir…”

This wholly English euphemism for, “Now do as you are told or else” always produces its desired effect of removing flies from hair. Leave, or be squashed. I left, thanking him, unsquashed for now. “If he calls again, please tell him that Professor Pitcairn called.”

It was a spur of the moment decision. “Sod it” again came into my head. What was the point of pussying around with subtlety? I should let Geoff Sullivan know I am on to him and see what he does. He can hardly threaten me with a shortening of my life. I’ll follow him next time, if I get another chance, though I don’t know if I can keep up with him.

I set off for home with the idea of reviewing a paper I had been preparing for months, but with each step I took its significance seemed to diminish as its memory blurred. I recalled going down to the kitchen to make a coffee before I left the house. I saw Elsie momentarily, up unnecessarily early now that work no longer pressed into her schedule. I recalled how, like an angler, I had cast little luring flies across the surface of our shared words, just possibly suggesting she might offer something about Geoff, given, of course, that he had just spent the night in her mother’s bed, but the bait remained floating above her interests, ignored, unsavoured, perhaps rejected as unsavoury, enigmatic. She’s a hard one.

I continued walking, albeit slowly. Things are changing. I feel less able to… to do anything, if truth be told. I am tired, but not tired like I should sleep. It’s a lethargy, an inability, a general lack of energy. I can’t concentrate. I can’t work. I can’t… I remember my father’s words. “There’s no such thing as can’t…” he used to say whenever the little boy claimed lack of ability.

And that’s about the sum total. I just can’t. I think of things I should do, things I should consider, things I should follow up, but I can’t bring myself to do them and, when I try, I get nowhere. I sit at my desk, I sit at my laptop, and the words that always used to come so easily, so easily, it has to be repeated, that the editing was always the greater task. But now the words just will not appear. It’s almost as if they no longer have any significance. Artefacts from thirty thousand years ago have lain around for a while, and a while longer will not affect their message. For me, personally, a lack of time breeds an incessant impatience to do something, to get something done, but I can’t seem to decide what. Definitively, I just can’t…

At least the business is complete. The trusty old laptop that has been carted around the world several times has now given up its most important file, the one that had to be sent. ‘Edward Pitcairn, business’, it was called. It’s taken me several days to put everything together. But now it’s done. The bank accounts, insurance policies, pensions, investments, all have been listed in one of those word processor tables where you can tab between the cells. Gem says she prefers a spreadsheet, but personally I can’t see the difference. It’s not as if we’re going to calculate anything… Login details and passwords are included, plus the contact information needed to register my death. I have even included up-to-date balances, but I created the table over the last week, so they will already be out of date. I was surprised at how much I am still worth, given that everything is going to be amortized in… how many days, or weeks I still don’t know. Well, at least it’s done and emailed off to Gem. She can peruse it at her leisure, but if she has a question, of course, she shouldn’t wait too long. It might not get answered. And, if one is posed, I’ll get yet another chance to speak of myself in the past tense. At least ‘tense’ will be accurate.

It might be concluded, given the above, that I was pretty much inside my own head as I hobbled along the pavement, not really having any goal in mind, except an eventual arrival at home. So, having drawn the blank at The Angel, I was dawdling rather than making progress. I resolved to be strong and set off at increased pace, as fast as I could muster, trying to ignore the fatigue. But my body, today, was at best partially listening.

I had crossed Pentonville Road and walked as far as the end of Liverpool Road, which I crossed, and I was ambling north along the raised level on the western side of Upper Street, when, by virtue of my elevation, I caught sight of my original quarry, Geoff Sullivan, walking south on the other side of the road, near the junction with Essex Road. It even took me a moment to recognise him, so completely had my thoughts been confined to myself. Why I might not have immediately placed him I have no idea, since he was in the only clothes I have ever seen him wearing, the same cracked leather jacket, the same checked shirt, the same faded jeans and the same scuffed trainers. It was the bag over the shoulder that really identified him at distance, black, cuboidal with a top zip running its full length, on a long strap, over large and always apparently hanging open.

I decided to give chase, but then reject the term, since, given my current state of fatigue, the word was probably inappropriate. I opted instead for ‘pursuit’. Luckily, Geoff Sullivan had not seen me, and, rather strangely, given that I had heard a self-description assessing himself as being a bit of a charger, he too was ambling along, pausing here and there to look in shop windows, clearly with no intention of buying even a window! I suppose his self-confession of being a ‘charger’ had been, that morning a week before, just a way of saying to me that he did not want me to walk with him to the station. No doubt, his destination had to be kept private.

I crossed the road and still had him in my sights. I was doing my utmost to catch up with him, but my energy was rather lacking. What seemed strange to me was his obvious dawdling. He was certainly going nowhere fast. In fact, he was displaying a tendency to stop at almost every shop window to peer at the displays, almost feigning interest. It’s not often that a forty-year-old man poses to peruse displays of greeting cards, toys, hardware, houses for sale, then a restaurant menu, more houses for sale, another menu and medical appliances, all aimed at people considerably less able than himself. I found, surprisingly, that I was catching up. Was he expecting me?

Soon, I was literally standing next to him, and I had not even rushed. Somehow, he had still not seen me. I was actually standing just a few feet from him. It seemed that we could have been almost touching shoulders and he would not have noticed, as he read the latest blurb on mortgage arrangements on offer from a national bank. A life-size, smiling black face displaying perfected teeth stared back at us from a reassuring suburban still life. The message was clear: no need to worry about money, because I’m here. I approached further and was literally a metre from him, but he still seemed much more interested in the shop fronts and, apart from regularly consulting the time on his mobile phone, which might have been glued to his left palm, he did not seem to be taking any notice of the world around him.

And then he took a call. He swiped his screen with his index finger and placed the phone close to his face. It was then, on the half-turn to bring the mobile up to his left ear, that he saw me and recognised that he had blundered. His expression so clearly said that he had seen a ghost that I actually did offer, “But I am not dead yet” under my breath, words that registered with no one but me. He stopped dead for a split second and then recovered what was obviously professional composure. He still had to take the call. He was about to say a name but choked on it. “Hello…” came out, but the following word he silenced, clipped to a labial stumble. He acknowledged my presence with a little wave of his right hand, before turning away and taking a few brisk steps until he was out of aural range.

There was a short pause while, paradoxically, he walked towards the edge of the pavement, closer to the traffic. Now this particular section of Upper Street is near to that strange little alleyway that goes by the resplendent name of Islington High Street. Anyone wanting quiet, anyone worried about hearing a phone call, anyone seeking respite from the traffic noise, would have walked the twenty paces or so needed to access the quiet pedestrian area parallel to the main road, always tranquil and quiet, despite its ‘High Street’ label. Our friend, Geoff, however, did the act exact opposite.

The call did not last long, just a minute or so. Its termination was indicated by another swipe of his screen and a new determination of purpose seemed to infect his presence. Now I became his focus. He came back towards me. Now there was recognition, and a hint of a smile, an extended hand in greeting, a touch on my upper arm, a reassurance, but there was also impatience in his voice, also an air of the rehearsed, at least to my ear, a planned, even learned manner. I will try to record what was said before I forget.

“Edward… Fancy meeting…”

“I live just up the road.”

He smiled. There was some irony, but I had the distinct impression he was trying to think of what tack to take with me. There was a distinct lack of spontaneity in his voice, as if he needed to acknowledge my presence, but also a determination that I had to be got rid of. It was I who continued.

“I saw you a while ago. I was trying to catch up, but I’m pretty exhausted.” I inserted a long pause that denied honesty.

“I’m not surprised. You probably shouldn’t be walking. Did you walk all the way from the house?”

“I did.” I was, of course, lying.

“It’s a long way…”

“No, it isn’t. I’ve been down as far as The Angel. I was actually on my way home.” I left a pause, looked straight at him and generally staggered a little. Now I have never been an actor. At college, as a twenty-year-old, I was in the dramsoc and played bit parts in Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real, Miller’s The Crucible and I even had a go at Krapp’s Last Tape, which is hardly a bit part. I had to learn how to survive by improvisation on the spot during the first evening of the two-day run because the real to reel Grundig kept chewing up my tape, which was, absurdly, not scripted. This little stagger was nothing better than ham, but at least it was pure ham, and if there is one thing a dying man can do convincingly, even if he does not try, is ham.

He stepped forward to steady me with soft hands offered to my upper arms. Had I actually collapsed, I would have fallen straight through his lack of grasp.

“Steady, steady, Edward. Are you feeling all right?”

It’s a stupid question at the best of times. but making that bland enquiry to a man with perhaps hours to live indicates a military lack of intelligence. Let me reassess. Aimed at me facing imminent death, it’s a comment nothing less than inane.

“No, I am a bit weak, actually…” I lied. “I came over a bit dizzy…”

“Should I ring Gem?”

“No. I’ll be all right. I’ll be right as rain with a coffee inside me… There is a caff I know just up there on the left, just off the start of Essex Road. You seem not to be in a hurry today. Would you like to come for a coffee?”

Of course, I realized immediately I had just admitted to watching him prior to our meeting. How else would I have noticed his dawdling? As things turned out, it was probably a fortuitous blunder, because it prompted a defensive response. Where there might have existed only partial interest, suddenly there was a desire for more involvement, more knowledge. Perhaps he might have made an excuse, but now that he realised that I acted with purpose, he was clearly newly motivated to learn more.

“I was just on my way to… I had an appointment… Give me a moment.”

He took a few paces away from me. Why? Again, the phone in the left hand was stroked by a right index finger. He spoke in muted tones, placing himself between me and the busy street so I heard nothing of what was said, but within a minute he was back with me.

“I managed to postpone my meeting. Where do you want to go?”

I pointed in the general direction of Essex Road where my favourite greasy spoon was located.

“Would you mind taking my arm for a moment? I’m quite unsteady.” In fact, I was as steady as a rock. I was trying desperately to think on my feet, which also I had to move and, momentarily, that seemed to be a problem. Moving my feet had just become the difficult part, whether because of tiredness or a fundamental change in my body, I did not know. I was no longer hamming. That was probably why he seemed to distrust my words.

It was only fifty metres or so to the door of La Fenice, the all-London Italian-owned greasy spoon that locals would cite as traditional in the face of arguments from Brexit Remainers. Local it was, and always was, in terms of its food, all through the three generations of Ligurian owners, despite the fact that pasta with pesto figured large, as did homemade tiramisu. They also always had the regular offer of fried plates, lamb's liver, loads of chips and any construction of sarnie that a cosmopolitan mind might concoct. I knew what I wanted.

“What can I get you,” Geoff asked after seeing me into the wall side of a high-back bench seat, the perfect place for my ploy.

“I’ll have a coffee, a cappuccino with chocolate. And can you get me an ox tongue sandwich with English mustard on white?”

I could have been speaking a different language.

He grimaced, why I don’t know. But there was method in my madness. The first observation might relate to the fact that I adore ox tongue. Pressed beef tongue is not something that adorns the menus in caffs in Indonesia, where one usually has to make do with laksa, chap-chaai, nasi lemak or mee goreng. The second observation relates to the fact that I know my ingredients and my caffs. Ask for tuna mayo, cheese, any ham, pastrami, mortadella, peanut butter with strawberry jam, or even bacon and there will be a ready supply, pre-cooked, pre-sliced, pre-prepared in one cell of the matrix of plastic tubs that parade in orderly fashion across the width of the chilled display. Ox tongue, being a truly expensive ingredient, however, resides in the fridge. The bread, of course, is ready buttered, assembled back in its original wrapper in ready paired pieces, fatty sides facing, where only one piece of each binary selection needs to be lifted to accept its enclosure. Essentially, any sandwich you care to mention is assembled, cut and plated for eating in or bagged for taking out within a minute. But retrieving the tongue from the fridge means crossing the back of the counter to the far end, locating a plastic box in the fridge, extracting it, removing the snap-fit plastic lid, selecting a slice of tongue, always ensuring that the slice beneath is not disturbed in any way, because breaking it would render it unsaleable, placing it on the awaiting bread, replacing the lid on the pot and taking the pot back to the fridge, and then spreading the other piece of bread with mustard. The extra minute that this would take allowed me to chance my arm. While Geoff waited, his vision of our table obscured by the high bench backs, I gambled that his phone had not yet re-adopted its security state and would still be active. He had left it on our table, realizing that he would need both hands to carry coffee and sarnies back from the bar. I swiped the screen, tapped the phone icon and then the log. There, atop a screen-filling list, were the names of the three people he had spoken to just a couple of minutes before. The first name was Elsie. I was not surprised. The next two I did not recognize immediately, but I do have the advantage of a photographic memory and Google did the rest. Long before Geoff returned on the first of his two trips back from the counter, I had already pressed the side button to power off the screen and put the machine back on standby.

“It takes a while to get one of those,” he said, placing my sandwich carefully before me as he slid across to the seat opposite.

“Are you not having anything to eat?”

“I had breakfast before I came out.”

“I can’t do with all that cardboard box stuff,” I said. “I prefer soup noodles, mee sup dengan daun dan cili.”

“What’s that?”

“Sorry, noodle soup with veg and chilli. Really sets you up for a hot day!”

“How are you feeling?” It wasn’t supposed to be a general enquiry, I’m sure, more of a request for an update on recent events.

“I feel strangely fine most of the time. But then a tiredness comes over me. I can’t predict it, and it has nothing to do with how active I have been. It comes on like it did a few moments ago, when I felt I couldn’t even lift my feet. A week ago, it happened once or twice a day. Now it comes on a lot more, possibly every hour.”

There was a particular look in his eyes. It said silently, “You don’t have long…” I said nothing, but communicated silently, “I know, you bloody fool!”

“I thought you were on your way to work when I saw you. I didn’t think I’d be able to catch up.”

He smiled inappropriately, condescendingly. “I had a home visit with a client. They live just around the corner, and I thought I would walk. But since I left home, I’ve been trying to contact them just to avoid arriving to find the house empty, or at least the door closed on me.”

“Happens often, does it?”

He shrugged. He was no better at hamming than me. “Not so often, but this was always going to be a risky one. It was to be one of those difficult occasions where the office is convinced that the claims being made just might be fraudulent.”

“Like a check… and inspection…”

“That kind of thing. It’s all done informally…”

“So that the people being inspected don’t realise what’s happening?”

“Pretty much.”

“And then they get their benefits cut…”

“If they have no right to them, yes.”

I decided to get to a point. “I thought you might be on your way to collect your mail…”

“My mail?” The look of confusion on that ever-so ordinary face was almost convincing.

“Down at The Angel, over the road… The big office building with all those occupancy plaques outside… The one with the security guard behind the desk on the left as you go in. The one where you have to show a pass to get in.” I made up the last part, but I knew it had to be true. “Which one of the listed companies on the outside do you work for?”

He now had to think quickly. As I took a large gulp of coffee, followed by a giant bite from the tongue sandwich, I rather let him off the hook, because inadvertently a piece of crust stuck in my throat. I coughed and almost regurgitated the bread. I loudly did the nose trick.

“Here,” he said, offering me a handful of napkins from the table dispenser by the wall.

“Sorry, there was more mustard than usual…” My eventual retrieval was better than the original pitch. “We thought you were a benefits clerk, but none of the concerns listed on that building have anything to do with the department of work and pensions, or local authorities, or any government office.”

“I work for an agency.”

“…to check up on benefit fraud?”

He nodded.

“Like a… like a freelance policeman?” I waited and watched, but he showed no signs of nibbling the bait. “Are you on commission? Fifty pence or so for every taxpayer pound saved?”

It was surely the ‘freelance policeman’ that did throw him, however, just momentarily.

“The company has a contract. I’m effectively freelance.”

“Zero hours?”

He nodded.

“And the company’s name?”

“You wouldn’t know it.”

“But it would be on the list over there…” I nodded in the general direction of the office block at The Angel, implying that I might even go and check, a comment that brought a swift change of tack.

“Look, Edward. Are you sure you don’t want me to get you a taxi?”

“Sure.”

“You were quite unsteady back there.”

“It’s passed. I’ll get the nineteen bus from Upper Street.”

“I’ll have to be going...”

“A client to see, no doubt.”

“I do have to work for a living.”

“…and the soon dead…”

He finished his coffee and stood, but before he could bid his goodbyes, I got my knife in where it might hurt. “Oh, by the way, if you see Elsie before I do, could you let her know that I did try ringing on her behalf for jobseeker’s allowance, but got nowhere. Perhaps you could help… It’s rather in your line, presumably.” He nodded and, preferring silence to incriminating himself, turned and left.

Tongue sandwich tastily eaten, cappuccino drunk and savoured, bus nineteen up Holloway Road and home exhausted, I made my way up to the top floor, noting that, of course, I was alone in the house. Elsie must be out job-hunting, I murmured. I’ll bet…

Lying on my bed, half-turned toward the trusty old laptop, I did a little Google detection. The first name on Geoff Sullivan’s list of recent contacts, accurately memorised, the one that followed Elsie’s on Geoff’s phone, turned out to be Tanya Reddie, the journalist who wrote the piece in the local news about the Hackney riot, the piece that mentioned Elsie’s employer by name and led to her sacking.

The other name proved harder to trace. The contact’s first name, as listed on Geoff’s list of calls was Al, which was clearly a diminutive. The surname was a common name and so I got pages of hits. I tried Alan, Albert, Alex, Alexander, Alphonse… I tried all the possible full versions as listed on the page Al (Given name) in Wikipedia. And then I realised I was being far too gender specific and tried a few female versions, Alexa, Alessanrda, and quite a number of others. I hit very lucky indeed with Alison, except with a ‘y’, Alysson. What a stupid name! But then things started to clear. The Alysson I found was another journalist, and quite a well-known one at that. Why I didn’t think of her before, even when I first saw the name, defeats me. It was obvious in the end. The Alysson in question writes for a particular right-wing rag of a newspaper and now also features on a rather new, right-wing, libertarian television news channel, where she presents a rolling, so-called news magazine for two hours every morning. Lo and behold, when I did my little bit of extra research, I found that she had devoted time on her show on each of the three previous days to none other than Uking Palace, specifically targeting the ‘overtly left-wing’ nature of the opposition to the project and spending considerable time analysing the role of a certain Elsie Pitcairn in organising the protests. I watched a clip on Youtube when she interviewed the minister who reportedly took the bribe to table the amended parliamentary motion that facilitated the by-passing of the planning rules. She questioned him on the validity of the process, but then merely accepted the apologetic response that acknowledged the criticism but then morphed into an aggressive dismissal of ‘all these people who want to stand in the way of progress and development’, followed by “we are working flat out to secure this ground-breaking deal to build the Uking Palace development”. I also checked her Wikipedia entry. Now there’s one thing that media people need more than anything else, and that is publicity. If they want a career, unless they are truly household names, they have to promote themselves, a practice that often results in such things as their favourite pets being recorded in the wiki entry. Unless, of course, they have another source of income, and they answer to another kind of boss. You can always tell a spook in the media, because their Wikipedia entry is short, succinct and utterly lacking in detail. Alysson Ward’s entry tells us that she grew up in Birmingham. We know the school she attended, and we can learn about which television programmes she has done. All three of them. And that’s it. She’s a spook. I also noted the fact that the log on Geoff’s phone indicated that he had spent over an hour on that call this morning, hardly a swift complaint about media bias. And hardly a check that a potential benefit fraudster was, in fact, at home.

Just a few minutes extra work is all it took. I do not claim to be a whizz at using search engines, but I suppose the demands of library research over the years have morphed so that now interrogating a document resource is very much the same as an internet search. It tends to give narrower results, but one still has to be selective with one’s filters and, crucially, creative with the terms one includes with a logical ‘not’.

It was not so hard to find out that Alysson Ward was a lesbian. She has not written extensively on sexuality, but she has contributed to several jointly authored articles in the past during the era when gays were campaigning for greater recognition of civil partnerships. One particular joint authorship stood out. Coincidence is always the more likely culprit, but just occasionally co-authorship goes deeper than a pair of names at the head of an article. There were also some pictures of Alysson Ward on the internet. Most of them showed her wearing her formal, made-up, television face, itself almost compressed under the sweeping overhang of blond hair, so heavily lacquered that a gale would not dislodge it, that has become her trademark. But not all photos of her show this official face, this product of the marketing company’s manufactured profile. Some show her out walking the moors, rambling casually while amassing material for the specialist guides she writes under a pen name. It was then, remembering Geoff’s gaff where he assumed that a single published photo of Penny Pitcairn represented the way she normally looked, that I realised that the multiplicity of pictures one normally sees of the media personality is not what she would look like if you met her on the street.

I recalled a memorable morning. A certain doctor named Khan had just completed his summary of my changed life chances. The morning did rather stick in the mind. I took a walk, I remember, and via Bedford Square and Russell Square finished in Coram Fields, where I spied a certain Mr. Sullivan meeting with someone I thought I recognised. Well, I now know that the person on the bench was Alysson Ward wearing her day-to-day face for a day-to-day meeting with my daughter’s bloke. And the name of Alysson Ward’s partner? It is a certain Wendy Davis, the journalist on The News who has been so interested in offering perspectives on Uking Palace.