Grey Area Read Free Page B

thinking just by looking at her. The other way round? No, I don’t think so. How can I put it, Mother is just a trifle déclassé, a tiny cut below myself. And anyway – she’s one of Dooley’s and that really scuppers it as far as I’m concerned.
    It’s strange the way that we all appear to have different motivations. Dooley acting apparently out of capriciousness; the Bollam sisters out of some perverted religiosity; Lechmere trying to see everything; Purves with his desire for orderliness – directing many many thousands of his rather dull little men to wash their cars every Saturday morning, and mow their lawns every Sunday afternoon, without fail . . . As for the Recorder and Lady Bob, well I wouldn’t presume, but I think I can safely say that they have everyone’s best interests at heart.
    And then there’s me. Acting, I would say, with absolute probity. Attempting to make sure that there is a kind of organic unity in London, that people have their right position and estate. It’s entirely appropriate that it should be me who fulfils this role; occupying, as I do, a sort of middle-to-upper-middle niche. I can look in both directions, up and down the social scale, and check that to the best of my abilities everybody is in his correct place.
    If 212 ethnic minority local councillors throughout the capital are getting a tad stroppy, then I make it my business to ensure that they’re knocked down a peg or two. What exactly? We-ell, I might have their children arrested for drugs, something like that. And if there are 709 little Sloaney women who fancy they are about to get their name in some glossy magazine, then I’m on hand to make sure the proof readers make the correct error.
    It can be still more subtle than this. In one blissful twenty-four-hour period, a month or so ago, I engineered it so that 45,902 of my people found themselves dropping the wrong name. Good, eh? I am good, good at the task in hand.
    It’s not snobbery! I thought I told you that at the outset. I deplore snobbery and it constitutes no part of my motivation. I simply believe that there is a natural order of people just as there is of things. A kind of periodic table on to which every element within every person can be fitted.
    Anyway, it’s not a responsibility that most people would be prepared to shoulder. It can be gruelling work and of course there is no reward to speak of.
    Yes, sometimes I do get depressed, very low. When I’m really down it amuses me to toy with this notion: that one of the little people might discover the truth. Discover not only that their freedom is a delusion; but that, furthermore, instead of being the hapless tool of some great deity, shoved up on a towering Titian-type cloud, they are instead jerked this way and that by a pervert in Bloomsbury, or a dullard in the Shell Centre, or an old incontinent in Clapton. Ye-es, it would be droll.
    I’m sorry? Yes, yes, that’s right, that’s what I was leading up to. When it gets too claustrophobic at home, when Mother’s rasping snore gets to me, and the old-woman smell of flannel, medicaments and cabbage is making me retch, I come here and engage someone like yourself in conversation. Someone bright, enquiring and interested. And then I do tell them – tell them everything.
    What’s that? Yes, of course, you are perceptive; naturally I can do this with impunity, because you’ll never remember anything I’ve told you. It will depart from your tiny mind when we part. For as I told you at the outset: there are really only eight people in London. And whereas I am fortunately one of them – you are emphatically not.

The Indian Mutiny

I killed a man when I was at school. I’m not just saying that, I really did. And you know the fact of it has eaten away at me for years. Even now, sitting in my office at the station, in the dead centre of a dead ordinary day, I get chilly and sweaty thinking about it.
    It was a shit thing to do, a truly bad thing. When I was