Transit(14)

‘Actually, I’m in no particular rush myself,’ he said presently. ‘My date for this evening just cancelled. Luckily,’ he said, ‘as it turns out.’

In the next-door chair, the boy sat staring interestedly at himself in the mirror.

‘What do you fancy?’ Sammy said to him. ‘Mohican? Buzz cut?’

He gave a sort of twitch of his shoulders and looked away. He had a soft, sallow face, with a long, rounded nose that gave him a ruminative expression. A strange secretive smile was forever playing around his plump pink mouth. Finally he murmured something, so quietly that it was inaudible.

‘What’s that?’ Sammy said.

She bent her head down towards him but he failed to repeat it.

‘Strange as it might sound,’ Dale was saying, ‘I was quite relieved. And this is a person I really like.’ He paused while he fastened a section of hair with a clip. ‘I just keep getting this feeling more and more these days –’ he paused again to fasten another – ‘that it’s more trouble than it’s worth.’

What was, I asked him.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ he said, ‘maybe it’s just an age thing. I just feel like I can’t be bothered.’

There had been a time, he went on, when the prospect of spending an evening alone would have terrified him, would actually have seemed so intimidating that he would have gone anywhere and done anything just to avoid it. But now he found that he’d just as soon be on his own.

‘And if other people have a problem with that,’ he said, ‘like I say, I can’t be bothered with them.’

I watched his dark figure in the glass, the fastidiousness of his quick fingers, the concentration on his long, narrow face. Behind him the receptionist was approaching with a phone in her hand. She tapped his shoulder and held it out to him.

‘For you,’ she said.

‘Ask them to leave a message,’ Dale said. ‘I’m with a client.’

The receptionist went away again and he rolled his eyes.

‘I persist in the belief that this is a creative job,’ he said. ‘But sometimes you have to wonder.’

He knew quite a lot of creative people, he went on after a while. It was just a type he happened to get on with. He had one friend in particular, a plumber, who made sculptures in his spare time. These sculptures were constructed entirely from materials he used in his plumbing job: lengths of pipe, valves and washers, drains, waste traps, you name it. He had a sort of blowtorch he used to heat the metal and bend it into different shapes.

‘He makes them in his garage,’ Dale said. ‘They’re actually quite good. The thing is, he can only do it when he’s off his trolley.’

He took a new section of hair and began to fix the clips around it.

On what, I said.

‘Crystal meth,’ Dale said. ‘The rest of the time he’s quite a normal bloke. But like I say, in his spare time he gets himself tanked up on crystal meth and locks himself in his garage. He says that sometimes he’ll wake up on his garage floor in the morning and there’ll be this thing beside him that he’s made and he’s got no memory at all of making it. He can’t remember a thing. It must be really strange,’ Dale said, inserting the last clip with pincer-like fingers. ‘Like seeing a part of yourself that’s invisible.’

He liked his friends – he thought he might have given me the wrong impression earlier – though he knew plenty of people who were still carrying on at forty the way that they had been at twenty-five: he actually found it slightly depressing, the spectacle of grown men frenziedly partying, still shoving things up their noses and whirling like brides on packed dance floors; personally, he had better things to do.

He straightened up and examined his work in the mirror, his fingertips resting lightly on my shoulders.

‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘that kind of life – the parties, the drugs, the staying up all night – is basically repetitive. It doesn’t get you anywhere and it isn’t meant to, because what it represents is freedom.’ He picked up the pink plastic dish and stirred its contents with the paintbrush. ‘And to stay free,’ he said, coating the brush with the thick brown paste, ‘you have to reject change.’

I asked him what he meant by that, and he stood for a moment with his eyes fixed on mine in the mirror, the paintbrush suspended in mid-air. Then he looked away again, taking a strand of hair and applying the paste to it with careful strokes.

‘Well, it’s true, isn’t it,’ he said, somewhat petulantly.

I said I wasn’t sure: when people freed themselves they usually forced change on everyone else. But it didn’t necessarily follow that to stay free was to stay the same. In fact, the first thing people sometimes did with their freedom was to find another version of the thing that had imprisoned them. Not changing, in other words, deprived them of what they’d gone to such trouble to attain.

‘It’s a bit like a revolving door,’ Dale said. ‘You’re not inside and you’re not outside. You can stay in it going round and round for as long as you like, and as long as you’re doing that you can call yourself free.’ He laid aside the strand of painted hair and began to paint a new section. ‘All I’m saying,’ he said, ‘is that freedom is overrated.’