After about six months of living there I spent a lot of time away from the apartment. Since Soma Jones wouldn’t visit me I would go to wherever he was drinking in the Royal Precinct. Daytimes that might be the Oslo Ice Cream Parlour, or sometimes he’d find local drinkers at the end of rows of 1920s Warner Flats.
For a while he even favoured the benches outside the gym which were uniformally splattered with pigeon guano and frequented by red-faced old men who drank Tennants Extra from cans hidden inside paper bags. Although he was initially enthusiastic about them, Soma soon tired of his winos.
“I thought they had something to offer. I’ll have to review outsiderhood.”
His reaction was typically gauche: he spent a few evenings a week working as a stage hand for a production of Oklahoma at the Little Broadway in Hatwell Cross. It was a woefully amateur production for teenagers organised by a discredited ex-headmistress called Finnegan. Finnegan had also been ejected from the Girl Guides and the WI but as far as I could see there was nothing suspicious or unsavoury about her execrable musical, sad as it was.
Soma would go out with the theatre crowd after rehearsal at The Jolly Butchers next door to the theatre. The walls of the pub were decorated with photographs from productions going back to the sixties. I had to know what it was about.
“What are we doing here? This is shit, you know?”
“You are a snob,” he told me, “you know that don’t you? I’ve always had an interest in stage design. It’s practically architecture, after all. And besides,” he inclined his head towards a scrawny redhead who was standing at the bar laughing, “I think I’m in there with the lighting crew.”
The affair with Heloise blew over before Oklahoma reached the stage. Soma spent a few weeks out of town visiting family and when he came back he bought himself a hatchback and a new sofa.
The first I knew about Soma Jones’ hatchback was when it almost knocked me over at a crossing in Petits Fours. Soma was driving with Clide in the passenger seat and Clide’s bass guitar taking up most of the back seat.
“Where are you going? Get in!”
I rearranged the bass across my lap and put my shopping bags on top of the body of the instrument. It was raining outside is a drizzling persistent manner. The car took of up the hill with a lurch.
“Where have you been?”
“Me?” asked Soma, “I’ve been out of town for a bit. This place starts feeling like a goldfish bowl. You go round and round…”
“And round and round…” added Clide.
“And round and round and before you know it another year has gone by. I’m not getting any younger, you know?”
“Yes, that would seem unlikely,” I said.
“Sarky bastard!” Soma dropped me at the top of my road, “you’ll have to come and see the sofa. It’s fucking great!”
“It really is,” added Clide.
That night it was very hot and sultry and I had a strange dream. I had been living in Kent for five years, somewhere near Gillingham. I was living with a woman called Sandra, she was a nurse. I was working on the railways. We both did long antisocial hours so we didn’t spend a lot of time in the flat together. We’d catch each other for a few hours mid-evening, mid-afternoon or mid-morning, depending on how our shifts intertwined.
My mother might have been living with us but I’m not sure. That part seemed grossly unlikely since she died when I was ten years old.
Sandra wanted children. For some reason this was impossible. Instead we’d buy each other little Lego sets as gifts. On Sunday nights we’d spread out all of the Lego on the carpet in the living room and make long chains out of it. We were happy doing that but the prospect of the long week ahead put a check on our happiness.
One weekend Sandra had to work a Sunday so we could play with the Lego. I wandered from room to room picking up things from tables and putting them on chairs, picking up things from windowsills and putting them on the floor. This wasn’t getting anywhere so I walked into town and got on a train.
The train took me to the far end of Maidstone beyond where I would normally go if we went shopping there. It was a warm afternoon and most of the shops were shut. In the distance sandy coloured brick towers rose above the trees. I went to investigate them, and as one sometimes does in a dream, found myself observing them slightly from above as if I was flying.
They were eight or nine storeys high and built from brick the consistency of biscuit. There were odd square absences in the walls where corridors carried residence past front doors and kitchen windows, like streets in the sky. Some of the towers had bridges connecting between these walkways. The afternoon sun turned the walls sometimes gold, sometimes ochre, and the shadows were a deep plum purple.
How had I never seen this place before? It seemed like I had missed out on something tremendously important and it was almost too late to make amends.
Trying to find my way back to the station I became lost. Streets trailed off at obscure angles to carry me to the riverfront or to vacant lots filled with broken blue pallets and newspaper. It was starting to get dark by the time I found the railway lines. They ran on in either direction undisturbed into the deep perspective crossing and merging into ever more complex junctions. One direction being as good as another I started to walk hoping to find the station again.
I woke up halfway through Jazz Record Requests. I’d left the radio on during the night, as well as my clothes from the day before. I must have got back from Clide’s some time in the early hours of the morning. I couldn’t remember anything much after eight or nine o clock. I wandered out into the kitchen and onto the rooftop. It was a bright windy day but it did nothing to blow away the mood of the dream. I knew that what I had remembered was only the tip of something far larger which was somehow submerged into the day I’d woken up into.
I also remembered that I was supposed to be going to see the new sofa. I showered dressed and got on a W12. It was a Sunday so the bus was full of noisy families smelling of roast dinner and sweat. I got of the bus a few stops early and walked to Soma Jones’ flat.
Clide was there. They’d apparently continued from the night before, or more accurately they hadn’t stopped.
“Where’s the car?” I asked.
“Fuck knows,” said Soma. Clide laughed.
The sofa was big, black and leather. It took up a good quarter of the room. It was covered in tabloids, blue Pelican paperbacks, cassettes, a spilled bag of tortilla chips and Clide.
“Is your bass still in the car?”
“Fuck knows,” said Clide. Soma laughed. Clide reached behind the sofa into a carrier bag and handed me a can of Tennants Super.
“Well,” said Soma, “you look nice today!”
I was in fact still very tired. “I didn’t sleep too well. I had this strange dream.” I told them about the dream. It was a pretty unfocussed performance. I was backtracking and remembering important points abruptly and inappropriately. Clide would occasionally throw tortilla chips at Soma who would start giggling or thrash his persecutor soundly with a newspaper. Soma lost his phone for a while and interrupted to story to get everyone to stand up so that he could look for it. It was, of course, in his pocket all of the time.
“I carry too much crap, you know?”
Eventually I brought the narrative to some sort of resolution which was greeted by some sort of distracted silence.
“Well,” said Soma, “what can I say? I wish you’d warned us about how boring your interior life was before you started.”
