and lichen with a rare patch of grass. A blowtorch, Lorimer thought, running his fingers over the now cool, roughened steel, of the camping gas variety that painters and decorators use, or chefs to brown the sugar on their cremés brulées. Quick work too, he assessed, a couple of men, or three, could do the car in ninety seconds. He imagined pale blue flames, a powerful smell, a spit and bubble as the paint ignited. What had Rintoul said? ‘It isn’t over yet.’ There was no choice now: Hogg and his oiling crew had to be called in. If Rintoul and Edmund wanted to play hardball, as Shane Ashgable would have said, they had no idea what lay in store for them.
The Toyota was fine in every other motoring regard and Lorimer drove easily – though a little self-consciously – through the hesitant beginnings of the rush-hour to Silvertown. He was aware, at traffic lights or waiting at junctions, of the curious looks his torched car received. He turned up the volume on his radio and some soothing Dvořák took him most of the way from Westminster to Canning Town while he kept his eyes fixed on the road.
The furniture van arrived with surprising promptness at half past nine and by ten o’clock his house was capable of supporting life. There was a bed and blankets and bed linen, a sofa, a divan for the spare room, a telephone, a portable television, a cherrywood table that could double as a desk and four dining-room chairs. He had bought some modern-looking cantilevered standard lamps so that he did not have to rely exclusively on the central lights in the ceiling and the kitchen was fitted out with a minimum of pots and pans, half a dozen wine glasses, a corkscrew, tin-opener and a young-married’s start-up set of cutlery and crockery. Now all he needed was a supply of lavatory paper and provisions and the place would be ready.
He stepped outside his front door and walked down the flagged concrete path that bisected the levelled square of mud which one day would be his front lawn and contemplated his new neighbourhood. He seemed to be quite alone in Albion Village this morning. A brindled cat flowed up and over a wooden fence, there was a car parked outside number 2 and some damp washing flapped and cracked on a whirligig behind number 7, but he was the only sign of bipedal life. Then there was the sudden blaring, ripping noise of a motorbike starting and one duly emerged, carrying a pillion passenger, and as it accelerated past him two bug-eyed heads turned to stare briefly at him. Hello there, Lorimer said to himself, half raising his hand, I’m your new neighbour. Then they were gone and the noise died away and he was left alone in Albion Village and the near-silence again.
That was fine by him: everything was new here, and he felt new also, a new species of man, as if he were in a newer city, different altogether, more anonymously European, somehow. He turned to the east towards this more proximate Europe and filled his lungs: that keen wind in his face had rushed and buffeted its way across France or Belgium or the Netherlands – he felt a little bowel-shift of excitement now he was established here in his new domain. He did not know a soul and, better still, not a soul knew him.
He squared his shoulders. Time for some phone calls on his new white telephone: first, summon the cod-liver oil brigade to deal with Rintoul then, second, set up the meet with rock ‘n’ roll legend David Watts.
206. Alan told me that there is a tribe in a remote part of the Philippines where you are severely punished if you wake a sleeping person. Sleep is the most precious gift, these tribespeople think, and to wake someone is effectively to steal something precious from him or her.
I was worried about being such an overloaded REM sleeper. Well, you’re a classic light sleeper, Alan said, and REM sleep is light sleep. But it doesn’t feel light, I said, it feels deep, when it happens. Ah, Alan said, that’s because it is only in REM sleep that you dream.
The Book of Transfiguration
David Watts lived in a vast, detached, white stuccoed house – in a quiet street off Holland Park Avenue – of the sort normally described as ‘ambassadorial’. It had its own high wall with a gate and