Observatory Mansions Read online

  Peter Bugg knew what was happening but he was a private man. A man who found it difficult to speak about himself. A man who found it difficult to speak to anyone. A man who was made nervous by verbal contact and hysterical by physical contact. A man who kept himself to himself, with a few exceptions, of which I was one. He knew what was happening to himself and it terrified him.

  His whole body was weeping.

  His whole body was sobbing.

  He knew that. What he wanted to know was:

  Why?

  A bespectacled blur.

  When I returned from work, I climbed the stairs past flat six, where I lived with my parents, up to the third floor. The door of flat eighteen was closed. The new occupant had occupied. The door was shut and I did not knock to introduce myself. I put my ear to the door. I heard nothing. All that I could hear on the third floor was the friendliness pouring out of Miss Higg’s television set.

  I returned home.

  I had a visitor.

  The visitor, who also kept a key to our flat, had let himself in. He was sitting in our largest room, a room that was a kitchen, a dining room and a sitting room. He was sitting on an upright pine chair facing a large red leather armchair. He was holding the hand of Father sitting in his armchair. The visitor was crying and sweating and smelling of a hundred different smells: Peter Bugg. Beads of sweat, islands, a-top his white shining skull.

  Peter Bugg proceeded to tell me about the person who had occupied flat eighteen. I knew this was the reason for his visit. He did not usually come to me on that day. He arrived, punctually, twice a week to help me change Father. And he looked in on Father when I was at work (Mother, who lived in the largest bedroom of our flat, mercifully changed herself). Peter Bugg’s visit was an exception then. Peter Bugg spoke.

  The new resident in flat eighteen, he explained, was not:

  1. Old.

  2. Dying.

  3. Male.

  The first two I had, I suppose, been expecting. It was unlikely that we would be so fortunate. The third was a shock. I had always considered that my imaginings of the new resident might be wildly inaccurate. I had tried to allow for that. But I had never considered, even for a moment, that the new resident would be a female. As to whether she was pretty, ugly, obese, skeletal, slim, freckled, fair-skinned or dark, Peter Bugg was unable to inform me. Nor could he remember her age.

  I can see her. I just can’t see what it is that I should see, what it is that I should describe.

  What do you see?

  I see … I see … a vague mass. Blurred. The mass was smoking a cigarette. There was smoke in my eyes. I was crying. Wait! There were two slight reflections around the region of the head. Yes! She was wearing spectacles.

  Anything more? There must be more.

  The poor weeping bundle had never, he elucidated, never been able to focus his eyes around the female form. It was a complete mystery to him. Even his mother? His mother, yes, he could remember better. She was the one married to his father, wasn’t she? Yes, he supposed, that was her. A vague, well-meaning fog.

  It transpired that Peter Bugg had met the new resident on the stairs and even spoken to her. He saw immediately, though not precisely, that she was not the sort of resident we could ever be happy with and told her so. He had twisted his face into a mask of bitterness and hate, a particular expression that had always horrified his pupils, and pointed words decisively and unpleasantly around the place where he believed a head might normally be expected to be placed on the female anatomy. These words:

  Go back to your home. Go away.

  And Peter Bugg believed that his intentions had been perfectly met in those two sentences. He was quite satisfied. But he had not expected a reply:

  This is my home now.

  It was her home now, she announced, and apparently she considered it to be. She continued up the stairs. Peter Bugg, appalled by her response, found himself a virtual waterfall of sweat and tears and nervously scrambled back into his home, flat ten.

  Frustrated by the selective nature of Bugg’s remembrances, I decided the first night that the new resident of flat eighteen spent with us to call on someone else in Observatory Mansions to try to discover more. We would visit Miss Higg of flat sixteen. But not immediately since it was then the time when Miss Higg would be sat in front of her television watching one of her favourite transmissions and we would certainly not be granted admission. We would politely wait until the transmission had finished. We ate. Why, I wondered aloud, and I had never considered this before, why was it that Peter Bugg could so effortlessly spend time with Miss Higg? She was, after all, female. He winced, sighed and then explained:

  I have never considered there to be anything remotely feminine about Claire Higg.

  Claire Higg.

  Claire Higg existed rarely in the present, rarely in the past and certainly never in the future. She had created for herself an alternative time frame called fiction. Miss Higg lived for fiction and she had been so completely living for fiction for such a long time that fiction had become, for her, reality. Despite the colours that poured out of Miss Higg’s television set there was something black and white about her, something almost moth-like in her pale, dry, youthless skin and in her dark, dusty clothes; she was a woman without moisture. And Claire Higg had contrived to completely forget what Claire Higg looked like. There were no mirrors in flat sixteen where she lived.

  Her flat consisted of six rooms, but she occupied only four of them, the other rooms growing ever-thicker rugs of dust in her absence. If she were to have walked into those other rooms she would not have been able to recognize them, she would be sure that she was somewhere else, that she had got lost. The other rooms were not fenced off from the rest of her flat, not at all, but there was a certain point in her flat that she had not crossed for quite some time. Nothing stopped her from crossing to the other side, she just didn’t. There was nothing for her there. All that she needed she had in her four rooms: kitchen, sitting room, bathroom, bedroom. She spent the majority of her days sitting in the warm comfort of her favourite armchair, facing and enjoying the friendliness that poured out of her television set. Her days were happy there. They were spent among friends. Among characters from soap operas. She loved them all, even the villains. Inside that magical television box were such beautiful colours, such beautiful people, such beautiful lives. Outside there was only little Miss Higg. But that did not matter to her. Since most of the day was spent amongst beautiful characters the remainder of the day could be spent thinking about those beautiful characters. Her brain would replay the day’s events, and she would giggle, tut-tut, cry and sigh with her loved ones once more. It was a full life. The days were so busy, in each one she had to cram funerals, weddings, births, scandals, love affairs, parties by the pool, important meetings in enormous offices, walks on the beach, rides on horses, surfing on the waves, tantrums, tears, kisses, the occasional prelude to sex and much else besides. When she went to sleep, she went smilingly to ready herself for another full day.

  Miss Higg’s magnolia-painted walls were once – before they were hers, when their windows looked out on to parkland filled with nonchalant cattle – decorated with a series of hunting prints. Now they were spotted with photographs carefully scissored out of magazines, pinioned there by blue tack, drawing pins and sewing needles. One man occurred particularly frequently: moustached, with a toothy grin and bronzed flesh. This man was also to be found on her mantelpiece, clamped between the glass and wood of a picture frame. This portrait included the hand of another alien person that rested on his right shoulder. The photograph had been cut so that the other person, certainly female, was lost. In her small kitchen, with its diminutive gas stove and baby refrigerator, Miss Higg exhibited a cork pin board on which were displayed more cut-outs of her television heroes.

  There was a rectangular mark on one of her magnolia walls where a photograph had once lived. This photograph was from Miss Higg’s very own, and once very real, life
. A passport photograph of a sickly looking man: Alec Magnitt, former resident of flat nineteen. Deceased. On the back of the photograph was an epigraph which read – Claire, Claire, I love you so. And signed: A. Magnitt, flat nineteen, Observatory Mansions. But the photograph was no longer there (lot 770).

  On that particular evening, Miss Higg’s transmission having ended and the news broadcast just beginning, an inconvenience she never watched or listened to, Miss Higg turned down the volume of her television set and heard a knocking on her door.

  An unscheduled programme replacing the

  nine o’clock news.

  Who? She wondered.

  It’s Peter, came the response. Peter and Francis Orme.

  She sighed, her mind on other creatures – other beautiful, sun-gold creatures who spoke of love and dollars. We were not part of her beautiful life. I had a swollen bottom lip, Peter Bugg was bald, was crying, was sweating. Our skins were pale. We had little money. At best we could have been extras, padding for the crowd scenes, kept in the back. But that evening we had come forward and were threatening to place ourselves in front of the viewer’s eyes. And Miss Higg’s eyes had adjusted themselves to beauty only. Coming out of that state of mind required a little concentration. She would have to convince herself that we were characters from the television and that the characters from the television were the real people. She would have to convince herself that she had switched the channels over and was caught on some documentary, probably, or some small-budget black and white film that was concerned solely with non-beautiful people without suntans and without money. She would have to convince herself that the actress who was about to perform the role of Miss Claire Higg had absolutely nothing to do with her. The name was just a coincidence. The real Miss Claire Higg was on a beach oceans away. How much convincing would that take?

  I’m busy.

  It’s nine o’clock. The news is on.

  I’m watching the news.

  You never watch the news.

  I’ve got company.

  Yes, but at the moment on the wrong side of your door.

  You can’t stay long.

  We shan’t stay long.

  No longer than half an hour.

  We know the news is only half an hour long.

  Come in. Sit down. Let me fetch you a martini.

  Miss Higg’s martini tasted more like tea. She sat in her favourite armchair and as we talked she placed sun cream on to her face and arms. She was still in her nightdress, she rarely wore anything else, she had no reason to venture outside, there was nothing for her there. Peter Bugg did her shopping. In her list of bare essentials there would often be a more idiosyncratic item: sun block, a bikini, a champagne glass, a red rose. These requirements were hidden between tea bags, mulligatawny soup, tuna chunks, tooth glue. Occasionally, though, even she went outside, but only when there were power cuts. When the electricity failed Peter Bugg and I would always go straight to her flat. There we would find her in a state of panic. We would put her in her coat and, each taking one arm, escort her downstairs. Time for your walk, we would say on those occasions. Everyone’s died, she would say. They haven’t died, we’d say, they’ll be back soon, time for a little fresh air. Then she would smile. You’re my beaux, don’t go taking advantage of me, she would say. We would say: We won’t. Peter Bugg and I, more lifting Miss Higg than escorting her, would walk her around the walled enclosure of Observatory Mansions. If, during the walk, the lights came back on inside the building she would begin to panic, and we would immediately cease our stroll and return her to her flat. Those were the only times Miss Higg left it.

  She had not always been like this. There were other Higg times too. She loved and was loved once, weren’t you Claire? I was, wasn’t I? Wasn’t I? But that is another story.

  Miss Higg had her reasons for not wanting a new resident. Particularly one living on her own floor. She wanted nothing to interrupt her viewing hours. She wanted no more company, considered it dangerous. A new companion might become attached to her television set, might have affairs with her beautiful friends. Worse though, a new companion might encourage her to see less television, might encourage her to visit the outdoors.

  She had, she told us, heard the new resident moving into flat eighteen. She had heard voices. Plural. Who was she conversing with? we enquired. With the Porter, she said. Impossible. Talking and hissing, we suggested. Talking and talking, she insisted. We ignored that comment, put it down to Miss Higg’s lack of concentration. Called the voices noises from her television. Later during the day someone had knocked on her door. The knock, she said, was a new knock. Was neither the knock of Peter nor the knock of Francis Orme.

  And?

  The knock had a voice with it.

  And what did it say?

  It said, Hello.

  And?

  It said, I know you’re in there I can hear your television.

  And what did you say?

  Nothing.

  Good.

  And then the knocking came back, and the voice with it.

  And what did the voice say?

  The voice said, I’m your new neighbour.

  And what did you say?

  Nothing.

  Good.

  And then the voice said, I hope we can be friends.

  And what did you say?

  Nothing.

  Good.

  And then the voice said, I’ll call back later, shall I?

  And what did you say?

  I said, No. Never.

  Very good.

  Then, explained Miss Higg, the voice and the knocking went away and never came back. We praised Miss Higg for her dialogue. We said, it’s all for the good of Observatory Mansions. Oh? she said. We said, it’s for the good of her privacy. Yes, she said, it was well done then.

  I asked her if there was anything about the voice that might describe its owner. Miss Higg thought it the voice of a woman, a young woman, probably in her twenties or thirties.

  We decided that through whatever means possible, the new resident must be out of Observatory Mansions within the week. I stroked my gloves – that white, that cotton – thinking hard. Claire Higg offered noise intrusions as a possibility. She proposed to keep her television set at all times (except during news broadcasts, documentaries, financial bulletins, weather reports, black and white films, wildlife programmes and police appeals) at its highest volume. Bugg and I thought this a good beginning. I suggested that, for my part, I follow the new resident wherever she went to try to discover what it was that made her want to live in this part of the city and what, if anything, might make her leave Observatory Mansions. Higg and Bugg thought this an excellent suggestion. But when it came to Bugg’s turn, he could think of nothing he could do to help.

  And so, after stroking my gloves for a few minutes, I came up with a task for him. Peter Bugg was, by use of the Porter’s ladder kept in the basement, to climb up to the window of flat eighteen. Whilst the new resident was out he was to enter her flat, make a note of all her possessions and move those possessions about, shift their places. Place everything in a different order. This was sure to intimidate the new resident enormously. It would cause her great concern, not only for the safety of her possessions, which we were to move into different places, but also for the safety of her person, which we were not to touch. A person’s objects make up their identity, they are placed inside a person’s home according to their specific tastes. When a person’s objects are moved by an unseen force, it feels to that person as if their soul is being played with, as if someone were messing with their insides.

  If all the windows of flat eighteen were shut Peter Bugg was instructed to try to wedge one open, but if that was not possible then he should carefully smash a pane of glass. But he, poor Bugg, nervously sweating and crying, wondered if perhaps he wasn’t the man for the job and if he could possibly do something else. What would happen if the police became involved, he added, he would surely have left his finger prints
everywhere. I told him to wear gloves. Poor Bugg didn’t have any so I leant him a pair of pink rubber ones. These I wore over my white gloves when I washed dishes.

  It’s nearly half past nine.

  Good night, Miss Higg.

  Good night, Francis Orme.

  Good night, Claire.

  Good night, Peter.

  And a little later …

  Good night, Francis.

  Good night, sir.

  Glove diary.

  I felt comforted to be back in my bedroom. Everything, I thought, now that we had decided to take action, would soon be sorted out. The threat would be moved on, we would become a calm people once more. No one was going to take away the peace in Observatory Mansions, no one was going to change our lives, no one was going to infiltrate flat six. I looked around my bedroom, soothed by what I saw.