Grey Area Read Free Page A

one of my people was doing the Samaritans and one of the Recorder’s phoned in . . . well, you can be certain that they were given an excess of sympathy, a beaming out of true caring.
    It was all to no avail. It wasn’t so much that it didn’t work (I know the Recorder thinks well of me, viz the ‘Good mornings’), it’s just that he didn’t reciprocate in any meaningful fashion – unless you count 34,876 items of junk mail, far more than my people have ever received from any of the other six’s lot.
    I don’t want to have to stoop to the tactics of Lechmere and the Bollam sisters. I don’t want to have to associate with that perverse crew any more than I have to. Of course, I am protected to some degree by my covert association with Colin Purves. He’s a worthy sort of chap – you know the kind – not that imaginative, a plodder really. He’s the only one of the eight of us who commutes. He lives down at Tunbridge Wells with his wife. (He probably refers to her as ‘my lady wife’ whilst propping up the saloon bar in the local pub.) He takes the eight-twenty-two to Charing Cross every morning and then crosses via the footbridge to his office on the South Bank. I believe he’s responsible (if that’s the right word – ‘responsibility’ seems slightly too grand) for the stationery purchasing of one department, of one division, of one subsidiary of a multi-national oil company.
    Lucky for Purves – having a desk job. It means that like me he has an opportunity to keep close to him the London phone directories, and the computer discs that hold pirated copies of all the electoral registers for London’s constituencies. Of course, neither of us has to have the physical evidence of all the people we control to hand, oh no. It’s just that Purves – like myself – finds it somewhat easier to get to grips with the job if he has some kind of a record of these multiplying blips of sentience.
    I like to hold the directory that contains the listing of the biggest chunk of the people I am manipulating at any given time. It gives me the feeling that I am in some sense holding them, caressing them, tweaking the strings that shift their little arms and little legs, their little mouths and little heads.
    I don’t get out a lot any more. Tonight is an exception. It’s nice just to sit here in the snug of the pub and watch the people laughing and drinking. It amuses me to try and guess which of them belongs to whom. That horsey-looking woman, yes her, the strawberry blonde with the Hermes headscarf drinking a ginger-beer shandy. Well, you would have thought she’d have to be Lady Bob’s or the Recorder’s, hmm? Well, you’re wrong, she belongs to the Bollam sisters. I know, I know, but you see, look at the sides of her neck, there’s a certain unresolved tension there in the tendons. It’s ever so subtle, but it’s enough for me to be able to tell.
    And the man who collects the glasses. All stooped over, with his drowned-rat beard, and that absurd mulberry-coloured quilted smoking jacket, the lapels of which are encrusted with silly badges. Lechmere’s. In fact, he’s one of Lechmere’s voyeurs. A particularly gruesome one, I should imagine. What’s that? You’re surprised it doesn’t make me paranoid having him here in my local . . . No, no, don’t be ridiculous, it matters not a jot. We comingle freely – all of us. There are some of the other’s people very close to me indeed. Couldn’t get any closer if they tried.
    No, no, I used to work, but I gave up my job at the bookshop to look after my mother. She’s almost ninety now and quite bedridden. It’s a fairly quiet life that Mother and I have. There’s not a lot of money, but there are a lot of bedpans to empty. An exciting interlude for the two of us is a visit from the health visitor, or an extra sausage from the meals on wheels. I suppose you could say that Mother and I are close – perhaps too close. I can sometimes guess what she’s