5

IN HOTEL JERICHO THE BEDS ARE NEVER CHANGED, THE WINDOWS never opened. Flies circle the naked light bulbs, static crackles on the broken TV screens. The taps all drip and the plugs all leak and the people all smell bad.

Someone’s crying in the basement, someone’s lying in the hail. No-one notices as I glide by, nobody at all.

I speak to no-one now. I dare not speak. Words have power and power corrupts. I spend all the time I can in my room. I only shop at night and I’m very careful what I buy. I have to keep the balance right. Too much salt and there might be another war. Too little sugar and who knows what might happen? I know, so I always take three in my coffee. No milk though, that might be dangerous.

I write only on lined paper in red exercise books. Thirty lines to the page, twenty pages to the book. I count the number of words on each page very carefully. The number of mis-spellings. The number of letters to each word, where to put the punctuation marks. If I’m wrong by a comma the results could be catastrophic.

I work very slowly. Very is in italics. I have to be very careful about italics.

I’m remembering back again now. Back to how it started. Back to when I became aware. The REVELATION.

So long ago.

I walked home from Fangio’s Bar that night. I didn’t take the free bus. It was a long walk home, but it seemed the thing to do at the time. I walked on the pavement cracks to compensate for the new trees they’d planted in the park and went part of the way barefoot because Sonic Energy Authority were at number one for the third consecutive week.

Of course I didn’t know I was doing it.

Not then.

But later. Later I would. Oh my word, yes.

I entered our house through the unlocked front door. No-one ever locked their doors in those days, not in our neighbourhood. It wasn’t that people were more honest back then, it’s just that no-one had anything worth nicking.

Muffled screams issued from the kitchen. Mum was ironing Dad’s shirt again. Since Dad had pawned the ironing-board, clothes had to be ironed while still on the body. It was a messy business, but wasn’t everything?

I wandered into the front parlour. Brother Andy sat in the armchair with a strained expression on his face. He was trying very hard to grow a moustache.

‘How’s it coming, Great One?’ I asked.

‘I had half a Zappata an hour ago, but it’s gone back in again.’

I seated myself on the Persian pouffe, a present from Uncle Brian. ‘Tell me,’ I said, ‘do I look strange to you?’

‘No, I recognized you at once.

‘Nothing odd about me, you would say?’

‘Have you grown a moustache?’

I felt my upper-lip area. ‘No,’ I said.

‘Well, don’t interrupt me when I’m trying to.’

I left him to his concentration and went up to my room.

I occupied the loft at this time. Once I had a bedroom of my own, next to my brother’s. But I came home from school one day to find all my things in the loft and his room knocked through into mine.

After several months I plucked up enough courage to ask him why I had been moved into the loft.

‘Why have I been moved into the loft, Great One?’ I asked him.

‘To keep the tigers away. ‘But there are no tigers round here.’ ‘There. So it works, doesn’t it?’ And that was that.

My brother had converted the loft. To Islam. It had been a simple ceremony, but moving. At the end of it he charged me a pound and informed me that I now had the power to issue fatwas, but only small ones and only against domestic animals. I looked up the word fatwa in the dictionary. It wasn’t there. The nearest to it was fatuous, which meant complacently or inanely stupid.

This bothered me.

Up in the loft I lit a candle and sat down upon my lilo. I took out the tape recorder from my pocket and gave it a thoughtful looking-over. There was something important on the tape, I just knew it. But it bothered me. Something deep inside was saying, ‘Don’t play it, don’t play it.’ Something even deeper was saying, ‘Go on, you have to.’ And something even deeper made a rude noise come out of my bottom.

I watched the candle flame turn green. An omen? It had to be. I rewound the tape and pressed the play button.

And nothing whatever came out.

So that was that.

Oh no it wasn’t. I had the pause button on.

I pressed upon the pause button and listened in awe to the conversation I’d had with Mr Colon in the alleyway.

The whole bit.

It was crazy stuff. The craziest. The message written in the stars. The butterfly’s wings. The compensating. And finally the line that sent shivers down my spine. ‘A man who could do that,’ I had said, ‘would have the world to play with. Such a man would be as God.’

I rewound the tape and played it again. And again and again and again until the batteries ran out. Then I pulled off the full spool and hid it away behind the water-tank. A chapter of my life was over.

A very short one, as it happened.

But there were further chapters yet to come and these, I felt certain, would be gloriously long.