Category: W.

Downtown Nashville consists largely of car parks. Odd bits of metal stick out of the ground at shin height. This is not a town for pedestrians, says W.

The honky tonks distress us with their noise and clamour. A fully outfitted cowboy walks down the street. – 'Must be German', says W.

We visit the full size concrete replica of the Parthenon. It sits vast and unapologetic in the sun. Why is it here? Why here, rather than anywhere else? These questions bewilder us.

Why?, cries W. Why? He needs shaking, he says. I should grab him by the lapels and slap him. Why?, I ask a passerby. Nashville's known as the Athens of the South, I'm told. It's because of all the universities. The educational institutions. We're in the Athens of the South, I tell W. Did he know that?

At Katie K.'s Western Outfitters, W. decides to be my dresser. He knows I've always wanted a Nudie Suit, or at the very least a Western-style shirt. I want Rhinestone embroidery! I want fringes!

W.'s sympathetic. He fetches me Western-style shirts, bootlace ties and cowboy boots, while I stand in the dressing room in my pants. But nothing will do. I still don't look like a Rhinestone Cowboy.

My own corner, that's where I should stay, W. says, and I am staying there. My own corner, with my own interests, which are contracting by the day, W. says. I engage less and less with the world. I've turned away, why is that?

There's an urgency to me, that much is clear. If I don't do it now …, I tell him. But do what? What's there to do?

My own corner, that's where I'm staying, he can see it. I'm like a prisoner in a cell that doesn't allow him to stand up. I'm crabbed, hunched - there are terrible constraints.

It's driving me crazy, anyone can see that, but still. Day after day, there's a kind of advance, that's what I tell him. I get a little deeper, the night gets a little more black …

But the night is also what allows me to see, isn't that it? Blindness becomes a kind of sight; constraint a version of liberation. Sometimes I feel like a dreadful liar, I tell him; sometimes I feel on the verge of truth.

And what's he to make of it all?, W. wonders. What's his place in all this? Somehow, obscurely, he feels it's his problem. Somehow, I've become his problem to solve.

Haven't I told him about it before, my dreadful desire for punishment? It makes sense to him now, W. says. It's as clear as anything, my dreadful desire for punishment. It's not as if it stems from real guilt, W. says. The kind of guilt he suffers as a Catholic, he says.

W. constantly asks himself how he might become a better person. It's all his fault, he thinks; everything's his fault. But in my case … Nothing's my fault, that's what I think, isn't it? Whatever I do, whatever I've done, it's still not my fault.

Why then do I want to be punished?, W. muses. What's the reason? Precisely because I believe it isn't my fault, W.'s worked out, he says. Precisely because because I don't believe I'm in any way responsible …

It's all fate to me, isn't it?, W. says. It's impersonal. None of us can do anything, it's all over. And now I want to be punished, so I can feel the full injustice of it all. Now to be punished, and for something I didn't do, and for my very inability to do anything, that's it, isn't it? And for the inability of anyone to do anything, at the whole imposture. And to laugh and laugh as they smash my face in and simultaneously smash their own laughing faces …

My laughter!, W. says. It's not that I laugh more than anyone else. It's my kind of laughter. Its the sense that I can barely bring it to an end, that I've always just begun. I've barely begun to laugh, isn't that it? I could laugh forever – isn't that it? They'd cut off my head, tear me apart, and still I'd be laughing, and laughing at myself laughing, strewn along the river …

I'm like some joke, W. says. A joke that's been told too many times and amuses no one. A joke of which everyone is sick. Sick and tired. They don't want to hear it again, but there it is, someone or other has to tell it again. But no one gets it anymore. No one finds it funny.

It's rather sad, that's how it strikes them. Pitiful. And it's sick, in a way. It's a joke upon them, in a way. A joke on everyone, on everything, W. says.

No wonder they don't laugh. No wonder they grimace, teeth bared. He's not going to protect me when they turn, W. says. And they are turning, can't I see it? They're going to turn on me, he says. They're going to tear me apart.

How do I get up in the morning?, W. always ponders. How do I go in to work? It's always baffled him, he says, the question of my motivation. – 'It's all finished for you. It's all over' – that's always been clear, W. says. But I go on regardless, don't I? I get up, go into work …

Something in me doesn't know I've died, W. says. Or something in me hasn't finished dying. It's groping forward, W. says. It's multiplying itself like some disgusting tumour. He can see it in my eyes, W. says, it's quite revolting. Cancer has a face, a form. Death is living a human life …

My dreadful hangovers, I always tell him about them, don't I? My dreadful hangovers … he can see the effect. I look terrible, absolutely terrible. I can barely string a few words together.

And then there's my smile, my dreadful smile. It's a corpse's grin, says W. There it is, shining through everything … It's as though I were taking some kind of revenge, W. says. As though I was exacting a kind of revenge upon myself, for what he doesn't know.

But why's he always in the firing line? Why does he have to be there to see one of my dreadful smiles? Because he doesn't think I'd smile if I were on my own, even though my smile, my dreadful smile seems like one of the most impersonal things in the world.

'You have that look which says everything's over, it's all finished', W. says. 'It's that look which says, we're all dead, we died some time ago … But it hasn't finished, has it?', W. says. 'And it won't have finished until that dreadful smile, the mockery of the whole of existence, is wiped from your face'. 

He's tried to put me out of my misery, W. says. God knows, he's tried. Hasn't everyone? No one tried hard enough, that's what W. discern, when we first met. And it became his task, to try hard enough, and what a task! How many times has he tried to explain it to me? How many emails has he sent? 

But it won't get through, W. says. I won't hear him. He's resorted to blows, W. says, but it was like beating a big, dumb animal. It seemed pointless, and cruel. How could I understand why I was being beaten? I bellowed, that was all. It was perfectly senseless.

He drew pictures, W. says. He scrawled red lines across my work, but I never understood; I carried on regardless. I'm tenacious, he has to give me that. Or rather, something is tenacious in me. How can I continue when there's so much that is wrong? It baffles everyone, W. says. Is he still going? Is he still alive?, they ask him, who can only shrug in dismay. What can he do?, he says.

No!. he writes in the margin. Rubbish!, he writes, underscoring the word several times, his biro piercing the paper. But still I continue. Still I go on, one page after another.

It's not happening, W. wants to say. This is not happening. Because nothing is happening, he says. It finished long ago. We're dead, we're all dead, but this is no afterlife. Life – what do we know of that? Living – we've never lived. We've never begun to live, especially me, says W. But I have no sense of it, do I? I carry on regardless, whistling away as if nothing were happening, which of course it isn't, W. says.

One day, says W., shit opened its eyes. One day, to the surprise of everyone, shit got up and walked around. – 'You were born'. It was a miracle, W. says. Shit found a voice; shit spoke; shit wrote – how extraordinary! But it was still shit, says W. – 'You're still shit'. I haven't understood that, have I?

Of course to me, everything's shit, it's all the same. – 'You're incapable of telling the difference'. I can't tell the difference between shit and non-shit, but there is a difference. – 'We were all so amazed that shit could speak, that we didn't think to tell you', W. says. Why should they tell shit boy? They laughed at him instead, who thought the world was made of shit. It's all shit, that's what was behind everything I said. We're all shit, all of us, that's what was behind everything I wrote.

'We thought it was hilarious', says W. 'But the joke was on us'. Because even he's losing it, the ability to tell shit apart from non-shit. It's hard to discern even for him, says W., the difference between shit and everything else. And meanwhile, there I am, happy as anything, a living piece of shit …

Every day the same humiliation, says W. Every day it's the same over again. How can he can stand it? How can anyone? Our credit's used up. The bailiffs are here, hammering down the door. But it's only W. who can hear them. It's only W. who knows, really knows, what is to come.

There is no future, W. says, and isn't that a relief? Great floods will swallow up the land. The sky will burn; the sun will swell in the sky. We're nearly there, at the end. It's nearly time …

There will be the great migration north; the great migration south. New fortresses will spring up in the dust. The scorched earth will spread everywhere; nothing will grow, nothing will live.

There will be wars between nations, and when there are no more nations, a war of all against all. The rich will enclose themselves behind high walls, and the poor will tear those walls down. And they'll die together, bones in the sand, corpses staring with their eyes shot out, corpses listening with bleeding ears …

But it will be a relief, a desperate relief. A great silence will descend. And we will have been forgotten, utterly forgotten.

Are we even alive?, says W. Is this even happening? Are we really talking – right now? Because all he can hear is a great roaring, W. says. He's falling, W. says, as through the clouds of Jupiter.

When will he ever hit anything real? When will he strike his head upon the hard shore of the real? Because that's what he wants, even if it dashes his head to pieces. That's all he wants, and especially if it dashes his head to pieces …

Only death is real, W. says, and it's time to die, it really is. But death isn't coming any closer. If anything, he's too healthy, and so am I. We need to be struck down, W. says. Eradicated, along with everyone who has known us. Our memory should be wiped from the earth … 

Sometimes W. finds the coming disaster a comforting thought. It will be a relief, a blessed relief, the parched earth, the boiling sky. Because won't it entail the absence of us? Won't it mean, at the very least, our complete destruction?

Only the disaster is real, W. says. There is no future. And isn't that a relief: that there will be no future?  And meanwhile, his long fall. Meanwhile our long fall through the clouds …

No more, says W. No more. He's passing through a dead zone, he says, as you are beginning to find in the oceans: blank regions where there is no life. There's no life in him! It's all over!

W.'s despairs are like magnetic fields, he says, like great clouds in the air through which he passes. They have nothing to do with his inner states at all. It's not a matter of emotion. His despairs, W. says, are not even his.

Why does he always feel he's falling? Why does he feel that nothing is real?

The argumentum ad misericordiam, that's the name for it, W. says, my basic scholarly move. It's the fallacy of appealing to pity or sympathy, which in my case is implied in the general state of the speaker, his bloodshot eyes, his shit-stained clothes. Don't I always give my presentations as though on my knees?, W. says.

It's as though I'm praying for mercy, W. says, although it's also, no doubt, a plea to put me out of my misery. Kill me now, that's what my presentations say. Don't spare me, which is why, inevitably I am spared. It would be too easy to destroy me, W. says. And who would clean up afterwards?

The proofs are spread around me, I tell W. I've marked them with little proofreader's symbols, but it's no good. What's the symbol for complete rubbish?, says W. What about burn immediately? What's the symbol for the desecration of thought? What's the symbol for kill me now? – 'What you've put your proofreaders through!', W. says. 'It's appalling'.

Literature destroyed us: we've always been agreed on that. The literary temptation was fatal. Of course, it would be different if read literature alongside philosophy, W. says, but literature, for us, could not help infecting our philosophy.

Yes, that's where it all went wrong. But don't you admire the fact that we feel something about literature?, I ask him. Don't you think it's what saves us? But W. is not persuaded. It makes us vague and full of pathos. That's all we have – pathos.

The argumentum ad misericordiam, that's the name for it, W. says, the fallacy of appealing to pity or sympathy, which is to say the basic argument we give on every occasion. Isn't why we always give examples of nuns and dogs in our presentations? Isn't it why we give our presentations with tears in our eyes?

W. speaks of his dream of a community, of a society of friends who would push each other to greatness. We speak of our absent friends over pints of Bass. Where are they now? Scattered all over the world! If only they were closer! Of what would we be capable! They would make us great! Perhaps that is his last temptation, W. says, the thought that something could make us great.

W., as always, is fascinated by my eating habits. He asks to put his hand on my belly. – 'It's big', he says. 'You look pregnant'. And then, 'This is just the start. You're going to get really fat'. It'll be elasticated trousers soon, he says.

W. has always liked chubby men, he says. We remember the fat singers we admire, drinking wine out of bottles on stage. Fat, angry men. He's angry because he's fat, I said of the singer of Modest Mouse. – 'No, he was angry and then he got fat', says W. Do you think he minds being fat?, I ask him. – 'He has other issues'.

Kafka was thin, W. reminds me. Yes, but he was ill. – 'Blanchot was thin', says W. But he was ill as well. - 'I bet Brod was fat'. Definitely, I agree. He drank too much, that's why he got fat. – 'Why do you think he drank?', W. says. Because he knew he was stupid.

My hair is shaved, W.'s piled up in a quiff. Does he pomade his hair? No, W. says, it's naturally like that. He looks like Gary Glitter, post disgrace, I tell him. I look like a thug, W. says. A monkey thug with great dangling arms in an army vest. Who could suspect me of any delicacy of thought? I look like what I am, W. says. I can't pretend otherwise. What about him, then? Was Gary Glitter a philosopher? Did Immanuel Kant have a quiff?

At night, our open-hearted hosts dream of the Yukon. How did they end up here, in the American south? How did they chance ending up here, in Nashville of all places, in the heart of the south?

It's a third world country!, cries our host. It's gone mad!, he says. When they first arrived in the country, he saw two 12 year old kids held face down by an armed security guard in a supermarket. The guard was pointing the gun at their heads, he says. At their heads! Kids! Our host went home and locked himself in and didn't come out for 10 days. This country is insane!, he cries.

We sit out on the porch drinking Plymouth Gin. This is yuppie hour, says our host, who is slowly recovering from his ordeals, when joggers and dog walkers fill the streets. At night it's too dangerous to go out, though. You never know what might happen. He rolls up his shirtsleeve and shows us his tattoo: workers of the world unite, it says.

Night falls and we are lost in the Smokies. Where's our cabin? Precipitous falls to the left and the right. Our host, the driver, is edgy. We get out and walk – the road's too steep for the car. What are we going to do?

Then we see it: the cabin. It's almost too late for our host. He's raving. What's he doing here? How did he end up here? He can't drive anymore, he, a non-driver! Not another mile! Later, he collapses on the balcony, still wet from the hot tub: the dying swan, half wrapped in a towel.

What's this country doing to him? How did he end up here? We talk softly to him over our Plymouth Gins cut with water. When he recovers, he speaks movingly of the early blues players. They led such short lives! But life is short! There's so little time! And here they are, our hosts, in America! What's going to become of them, Canadians in America?

We'd listened to early gospel and country blues while we drove. The Golden Gate Singers. Barbecue Bob. Memphis Minnie. It kept us sane. Route 441 took us through the 'Redneck Riviera', Pigeon Forge. With every mini-golf course or water ride we passed, our host sank lower. With every giant golden cross on a hilltop, every novelty motel and advert for apocalyptically-themed shows for all the family (aerial battles of angels; re-enactments of the crucifixion), his cries grew louder. Kroger's, The Old Time Country Shop, more huge crosses looming over nowhere … There's no room for satire, he wailed. It satirises itself! It satirises us! We're helpless!

Only turnip greens can save us, he decided. We put on a great pan of them in our cabin, to have with our Plymouth Gin. Turnip Greens! Barbecue Bob! Memphis Minnie! The Golden Gate Singers! These are the talismans that might allow him to survive the USA.

It's a car city, our host tells us of Nashville. You're nothing without a car. When they'd first arrived in America, they tried to do without a car, he says. They walked and rode the bus everywhere. The buses are great here, he says. You can have great conversations. Everyone talks, he says. But it takes hours to get anywhere.

They took up cycling. Everyone thinks you're crazy if you cycle here, he says. People yell at you. People yell, why are you cycling? But he cycles to work nonetheless, he says.

But they've bought a car now. They had to. How else could they get to La Hacienda, their favourite restaurant? The only thing for them is to become Mexican, they decided. To learn Spanish. To learn to Salsa.

And how else would they get to their favourite Vietnamese restaurant? The only thing for them is become Vietnamese, they decided. To learn Vietnamese. To make ramens.

The size of the carpark outside the Vietnamese restaurant amazes us, when our hosts take us there. Madly, our host drives us round and round in circles. I can't get over the amount of space here!, he says. It's madness!

Over dinner, he tells us of his project to photograph the old parts of Nashville before they're demolished. There's virtually nothing of it left, he says. It keeps him sane, he says, cycling round the old ruins and finding a way to break in and take pictures of what he finds. When we get home that evening, he shows us a slide show of photographs on his laptop and trembles with melancholy. Where did it all go wrong?

In a bar at Five Points, Nashville, W. berates the bartender about the poor choice of gin. Bombay Gin is terrible, he tells her. Tanqueray isn't bad, especially with tonic, but Bombay Gin is a marketing gimmick. She says her customers like it. W. tells her to introduce them to Plymouth Gin. Why hasn't she got any Plymouth Gin? You can get it in America. Our bartender looks annoyed. She'll get what her customers want, she tells us. But how do they know what they want when they haven't tried Plymouth Gin?, W. asks. I don't think she wants to hear about Plymouth Gin, I tell W.

Later, as we sit out on our hosts' porch drinking Plymouth Gin, we talk about music. He plays us Barbecue Bob and Memphis Minnie (trading licks with Kansas Joe McCoy) and Big Joe Williams (with his nine string guitar). Our host makes us listen to the funk guitar style of the Mississippi Sheiks. You pronounce it sheeks, he says. He points out their sophisticated harmonies, and the subtle interplay of instruments. It's their microphone technique, he tells us.

You find the ultimate blend of melody and rhythm in string bands, our host says. He's become a real enemy of melody, he says. He hates dead syncopations, he says. He hates drums. As soon as drums came in, that was it. W. thinks he's gone too far. So does Sal. Fuck melody!, says our host. I'm swept up by his arguments. Fuck melody!, I shout. Fuck drums!

Our host plays us some early John Lee Hooker. He plays electric guitar rhythmically, he says. Rhythm is everything, he says. He puts on Bukka White. The guitar produces the rhythm, says our host. It doesn't follow it. Fuck drums!, I shout. Fuck melody!

Our first taxi driver in Memphis, who picks us up from the bus station, has a sign on his sunshade saying, It's My Birthday Today. He's a fat man, very fat, and it's as though he's been poured into his taxi. How fat he is!, we marvel to ourselves. But he seems very comfortable wedged into his car, as though poured there. Memphis, unexpectedly, is cold. The weather doesn't know what it's doing, he tells us.

Our second taxi driver, who picks us up from the hotel to take us to Graceland, is wearing what appear to be pajamas. Comfortable for driving, we surmise. Hearing our British accents, he asks where we're from. Nottingham, says Sal. We're from Plymouth – and Newcastle, W. and I tell him. Nottingham, says the taxi driver. Robin Hood and his Merry Men, they're from Nottingham, he says. Do you know them?

Then he gets a phonecall. I've got some passengers from Nottingham, says the taxi driver. You know, Robin Hood and his Merry Men? He has to go now, he says, on the phone. And then to us, that was my brother. We grew up on Robin Hood and his Merry Men. The Sheriff of Nottingham. The Adventures of Robin Hood, that's what it was called on TV. Is it a true story, Robin Hood and his Merry Men?, he asks. It's an amalgamation of different stories, W. tells him.

It's My Birthday Today, says the sign on his sunshield. Is it your birthday?, we ask him, when he drops us off at Graceland. It is. Happy birthday, we say. He's got a barbeque later, he says. He's getting together with his brother and his family.

He tells us we should take his card, and to call him when we're through with our tour. When he picks us up later, coming straight from his barbeque, he tells us about Elvis. The young Elvis used to come up to the black clubs on Beale Street, he tells us. He was no racist, he says, when W. asks him. He was the only white boy there, on Beale Street.

He tells us Beale Street was almost entirely rebuilt in the 1980s. Back in '68, when Dr King was assassinated, he tells us, he city authorities demolished Beale Street, home of the blues, and the surrounding areas, because they said there would be trouble. But there was no trouble, the taxi driver tells us, no riots.

He drives us past the Civil Rights Museum, right next to the hotel where Dr King was shot and waves to a woman who's kept a 25 year protest against the demolition of black businesses there. It's not what Dr King would have wanted, says our taxi driver, the demolition of the black businesses.

Our first taxi driver, A Somalian, picks us up from Nashville airport and detoured to pick up his checkers board. He and the other taxi drivers play checkers together when it's quiet, he tells us. One, another Somalian, was a checkers champion back home, a real expert. Sometimes he wins 10 times in a row, which antagonises the Nigerians, who generally dislike the Somalians. When he hears our English accents, he tells us he doesn't care for his adopted country. He's lost here, he says, though he's working hard. He pulls shift after shift, but it's hard to make any real money. It's quiet pretty often, he says. But there's always checkers, he says.

Our second Nashville taxi driver, who takes us to the bus station, is also Somalian. When he hears our English accents, he tells us without equivocation that the USA is a third world country. He tells us about the lack of healthcare and the low wages. You can't make enough money to live on as a taxi driver, he says.

People come to the USA for a better life, he says, and they end up killing themselves. He's known plenty of people who've killed themselves. They want to come to America, studying at college for a better life, and they work three jobs, he says. And then they kill themselves, he says. He's been to Bristol, our taxi driver says. He knows how people live in England. He has relatives there. People can get on in England, he says.

Our third Nashville taxi driver, on the way back to the airport, is the voice of the apocalypse. Upon hearing our English accents, he speaks to us in a voice of infinite despair and resignation. In America, he says, your teeth rot in your mouth, because you can't afford healthcare. There's the rich and there's the poor, he says, and the poor have nothing and will never have anything but nothing.

There's no minimum wage here, the driver say. People are paid 5, 6 dollars an hour, that's all. People are dying, he says. People are shooting other people …

Americans! How we love them! They're everything we want to be! Blithe! Innocent, as though they've just arrived on the earth! Look at them! Look at us! What's wrong with us? Everything that's right with them! What's right with them? The exact opposite of what's wrong with us!

They belong on yachts, a great fleet of yachts! They belong on the open sea, yachting along! We'd be their cabin boys, we agree. They'd be upstairs, on the deck, and we'd be downstairs, cleaning their things, scrubbing them. How fresh they are! How clean!

Their teeth dazzle us. What do they think of English teeth?, we wonder. What do they think of us? They'll never understand, we agree, these Americans. They're not mired in themselves. They're not stunted, or bitter.

Of course, these are the rich Americans, we agree. They can afford to fix their teeth, which look radioactive, we agree. Where are the poor Americans? Back at home, without healthcare! Back at home, teeth rotting, in a worse state than ours, with no healthcare.

There are the Americans on one side (we're thinking of the ones queuing up for the tour bus), we agree, then us, then the Europeans. We're in the middle: not as softly spoken as the Europeans, to be sure, not as intellectual – for the Europeans are intellectual, perpetually intellectual, all of them, but not as loudly spoken as the Americans, not as forward, not as bright, for the Americans are bright, we're agreed.

What does it mean to be British?, we muse. We're neither of the new world or of the old world, neither one or the other. We lack confidence; we lack tradition. We can neither make a new world nor live altogether in an old one. This country … Rats running over rats, we agree. Cynicism and opportunism, we agree. And where are we in all this? At the bottom, we agree. At the very bottom, and full of sourness and resentment.

Didn't W. have the chance to live in Strasbourg? Couldn't he have stayed on there, long past the 6 months he actually spent there? It was his Britishness that prevented it, W. says. He was too British! The boulevards were too quiet for him. The streets too civilised … Above all, it was the humour.

They don't hate themselves, he says of the Europeans. They don't despise themselves, not like us. We despise ourselves, and that's our humour. It'll come to nothing: that's what our humour says. Don't even begin.

The Americans don't hate themselves, of course. Neither do they love themselves, not Americans. They're full of newness, the salt is in their hair, their deck shoes on, and they're facing the future with their caps worn backwards. If only we could be as young as them, as innocent, we say over our morning beers.

Here we are, on the way to oblivion, and there they are, all fresh and new. Here we are, drinking steadily, drinking to reach the other side of the day, and there they are, free of alcohol, free of anything but their freedom, the sun dazzling us from their white teeth.

Americans are taller than us, we agree. They have whiter teeth – much whiter, it's dazzling – and whiter shirts, or blouses. They wear deck shoes, we notice, as though they were on a yacht. And they're first born, as William James would say, not old and jaded like us.

They are as fresh as the sea breeze, we agree. They're louder than us, and more confident. Who else would wear caps back to front? Yet there they are wearing caps back to front. Who else queue up in such an orderly way for their tourist bus? Yet there they are, the young Americans, queuing up, while we drink our morning beers in the sun.

Of course, I'm fascinated by the damp, I tell W. I can't help it. I go out there again, to the kitchen, to the bathroom. I put my hand on the clammy wall. The damp is calling me. The damp wants a witness to itself. And who am I but the one who sees it, touches it? Who am I but the one with its spores in his lungs?

One night it grew me, I tell W. One night a spore unfolded itself to a make a man, a golem of damp. And the damp wrote its name on my forehead and placed its charm on my tongue …

Somewhere, on the other side of the wall, life has reached a new level, I tell W. Somewhere, damp mutters to itself; damp dreams, there behind the wall. And what will it say when it comes to itself? What will the damp say when it wakes up?

'The damp', says W. 'That's your apocalypse'. Does he know I have mushrooms growing from the ceiling? Does he know they're gathered in the far upper corner of the kitchen as in an armpit? It used to make me shudder, I tell W. I used to hate it. But now …

That's how the leak from upstairs was found, I tell W. It was a sign. But there's something coming from beneath the flat, I tell W. Something rising. You'll have to get someone out, said the plumber. It's urgent. He thinks a pipe's burst, I tell W. He thinks I should get on to the water company.

I called them first thing, the water company, I tell W. First thing, when the lines opened in the morning, and then for forty days in a row. There were no direct lines, of course. The same queues. The same dumb music every time. The same half hour wasted, and explaining to someone new, someone else, the whole history of the problem.

I tried pleading and wailing and severity, I tell him. Sometimes I lost my will, all hope, and sometimes I was filled with new hope and a fresh will. My heart leapt like a flying fish; it sank again. Every day! Every morning! And for forty mornings. And still the damp in the air. Still the mould in my lungs like wet asbestos. Spores grew in my heart, mildew on my skin; the air was wet …

It was the industry regulator who saved me, I tell W. It was his advice, W.'s, to call the industry regulator, he said. Call Offwat!, he said. I called Offwat. I spoke to someone. The next day, a subcontractor of the water company phoned back; they'd dig up the lane behind the flat to find the leak.

The next day they were there, without announcing themselves. But they were working far away in the lane, and the leak was close, in the yard. I called a workman in. Listen, I said, I tell W. Do you hear it? He pressed a listening cup to the concrete. He heard it, he said. It's where copper meets lead, he said. The lead comes off the mains in the lane and then meets copper, he said. They're always leaking, he said. But he wasn't allowed to dig up the yard, he said. I'd have to sign a permission slip for that.

Weeks passed. Offwat were on the case; the complaints department knows me; the subcontractors who work for the water company know my name, but still nothing was done. Forty days passed – another forty, until finally, they came out again to dig up the lane, the same hole, and gave the same verdict.

'Did you pray?', W. says. I didn't pray. – 'You should have prayed', says W. I made phonecalls instead, I tell W. Those were my prayer-wheels. I rang; I spoke to people; they spoke to me. A reassuring voice. It's in my hands now. But I've heard that before, I reply. I've heard it many times. The same voice. We'll do what we can, Mr —. I'll personally see to it. Or, another time, I understand your frustration; I'd be just as annoyed if I were in your position. Or, still another time, Don't worry, you'll hear from us soon.

Sometimes the water company tells me to speak to the subcontractors instead. But then the subcontractors tell me to speak to the water company. And there's Offwat, too, the industry regulators, who claim to speak to both the water company and the subcontractors, I tell W. – 'You're in the desert', W. says. 'It's a test'. It is a test. – 'You bear it calmly', W. says. 'You're used to the apocalypse. Mired in it. Lost in the mud'.