Directly opposite Victoria, Jimmy Hatch had sensed the tension just arrived, in the same sort of way that one might sense the Loch Ness Monster surfacing several feet in front of one’s small wooden rowing boat. Even through his stygian depth of concentration, he could sense it. Reluctantly he raised his rounded face from the words on his page, and investigated. “Reluctantly” is an understatement, but a good enough starting point. Jimmy was making great progress: there were times when he truly believed that he’d cracked it, only to find it yet another false summit. But that wasn’t such a bad thing: falsehood notwithstanding, his summits were generally climbing higher and it was only a matter of time and perseverance and he had made it, surely. “Made it” was totally subjective, of course, but Jimmy would know when it happened. His capacity for time and perseverance was matched by his honesty to himself.

A simple enough task to define, a tricky one to measure and a fiendish one to complete. That was what faced him.

 

He had first heard Kid A over Christmas in 2000, fresh off the presses, and had had to lie down for a while afterwards to allow the numbness to subside. Or rather to sink in like a coat of varnish. Kind of subcutaneous, although somehow more than that: even deeper, yet with some sort of a positive effect on him externally. It was difficult to explain, which explains why he had never tried to.

Some months, or perhaps it was years, later, he gently closed the book he was reading, lay back and waited. The book was The Autumn of the Patriarch; the sentence he had just completed a mere 16 pages in scope. Sure enough, the separated whey sloshing around his consciousness gradually established with him a form of communion and began to merge. Jimmy’s internal clock was reset. Everything started from zero once more.

Around a year ago; he had taken a call at about 5.10 in the morning. Well, he hadn’t taken it as such – Claire had answered. She was the sort of person who thought that any call arriving at that time in the morning had to be important. She had a point: it was his mother. His brother Tom had got caught up in some nonsense in a pub, nothing to do with him, and taken a glass to the neck. He bled to death before the paramedics reached him.

Jimmy hadn’t owned brand new football boots until he was 12, or chosen his own coat until 14, and that was just fine with him. Cast-off wasn’t a negative term when it applied to Tommy’s things. Just a shame it had never worked that way with girls, too. The older boy was as proud of his little brother as Jimmy was awestruck in return, although neither of them would ever really know or tell the full extent of that love.

All through his life, for as long as he could remember, Jimmy was the one who had done special things: spectacular results at school, professional trials for every sport he had taken up, national publicity and registered patents for devices and techniques he had personally invented during his career. But in Jimmy’s eyes it was simple: there was only ever one man to whom he would defer or whose approval he would seek in preference to anybody else’s, and that was his hero: his big brother.

And now he was dead. What did that mean? Everything he was ever going to do, he had already done. Even the things he was planning on doing today or tomorrow or next week: they would never arrive. He would never speak again; never knock on the door; any door; never buy a pint or dive into a swimming pool; never grin, flirt or have children; never again tell the beekeeper joke or order the most expensive wine on the menu. All of his potential had been removed, whilst at the same time all that remained of him was a dizzying mass of potentials, none of which could now ever be converted into actuality. Was there a potentiality paradox in there somewhere? Or is it just a dead person. Maybe Aristotle could consider that while he was shoving his entelecheia up his arse. Tommy’s energeia had stained the floor of the Dog and Compass a deep crimson and wouldn’t be going to work any more.

Unlike its predecessors, this third life-changing blow didn’t just sit like a new coat of varnish or separated whey on Jimmy’s consciousness. It hung on his shoulders, a monstrous tacky weight. It wasn’t the death that was the problem – he knew death from a thousand different sources and had the armoury to deal with it – but the loss, the personal loss. The stripping of something so fundamental to one’s understanding of self is a colossal concept, and Jimmy, naturally, struggled.

He struggled long past the funeral, which was another event that happened in due course, but which Tommy didn’t really attend. His body was there, of course, but he was dead so he couldn’t rightfully be said to have been present.

Time passed. If anything, the feeling of living in a thud and echo chamber became more, not less, intense. Jimmy knew it wasn’t right – grief wasn’t supposed to work like that – but nothing turned it down. He had to take positive action, and it had to come from himself. It wasn’t going away, just like Kid A and Autumn of the Patriarch hadn’t either, initially. The difference was that they were finally absorbed, and the results were undeniable. Imagine the payback if he could let in this one the same way.

In desperation, he started to listen to the album closely again, and to read the book. He figured there must be clues in there, clues to remind him of how he allowed them past his cerebral gatekeeper, and that could guide him now. Over and over he ploughed through them. There wasn’t enough time to devote to it properly, but he found moments he didn’t previously know he had.

Weeks and months disappeared; Claire left to live with a commercial property agent, but Jimmy was coming no closer to the point where he could assimilate the rational ectoplasm that still hovered around him. It was like hell.

Then, one June day, something peculiar happened that mightn’t have. Jimmy hadn’t really slept properly for a month or so, hardly at all for the previous 3 nights. He opened Patriarch where he’d left off, ignoring the headphones already in situ, and dreamily set off. Diving deeper and deeper into the latest Amazonian sentence, his mind started to clear and he felt a touch of lightenment that took him right back to a long lost time when Tommy might have run up behind and rugby tackled him. It was almost transcendental, and Jimmy grasped hold of it for dear life.

Further and further he ploughed through the morass, and it was only when the boys reached the end of How to Disappear Completely that it dawned on him what exactly had been going on. The twin pillars of his quest had been playing in parallel; he had experienced them simultaneously, and there had been no discernable effect on the quality of his appreciation of either. And, while the dual prongs of consciousness had happened and continued to happen, his infernal load had actually lightened. Not much, granted, but there was no doubting that it had disappeared altogether for the duration of the miracle, then returned less intense.

A radiant Jimmy removed his earphones, set the book gently down on the kitchen table, and gazed peacefully at a window for a minute or two, grinning a shallow grin. Could it really be so simple? Then he slept for three days solid and only some desperate and undignified grovelling saved him his job. Still, he now knew what he needed to do, and that put him at an advantage over the majority of his colleagues in this human race. The fact that what he had to do ran roughshod over the rest of his life was a shame, but there was nothing to be done about that.

 

Regularly he would miss his stop in the morning, especially if he had got through a whole song or two and thought he was close to a breakthrough. There were times when he could lose a full morning on an unplanned trip to West Finchley, especially since he’d invested in the new headphones, and his world now hung by a thread.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

Jimmy’s reluctantly raised rounded face (the roundedness used to drive him mad, especially when taken together with his eyes, which were too small for his liking, although he was pleased with a mouth that had been described as ‘ironic’ by respected observers) directed those diminutive eyes right in the direction of a chill blast from a long ago past. Years may come and go, lives may start and end, age may weave its own version of spiteful magic, but you can’t mistake a broken nose like that. His knuckles tingled as he traced its line with his gaze.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

Head boy, rugby captain, feared fast bowler, chess champion, pretty much guaranteed his place at Durham, general all-round school poster boy, chief bully; there wasn’t much that Rufus hadn’t achieved in his glittering educational career. But the loss of his chess crown in the last meaningful action before exams seriously jolted him. Jimmy had a pretty good idea of the depth of irrelevance he occupied in Rufus’ world, so to take him apart in front of the whole school, while they all squirmed with guilty pleasure, was as close to paradise as he could remember up to that point in his life.

A night of mulling it over had clearly made things infinitely worse. Jimmy could even imagine the thought processes lumbering through the soup inside Rufus’ head: he was the man. It was his name all over those honours boards in the hall. And to round it off with a record third successive chess title, well…… Something for the future generations to aim for, of course, as his name stood proud and indelible and untouchable. James Fucking Hatch?? Who the fuck was he to fuck that up?

‘Hatch! I want a rematch. You got me on a bad day. It doesn’t count. Now get yourself up to the common room for the real thing.’

Jimmy was a bit shocked to hear Rufus’ voice addressing him directly.

‘What are you talking about, Strauss? The final was yesterday. I won.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. Have you seen the names on the boards in Hall? They’re all mine. I wouldn’t lose to a no-mark like you unless there was something wrong. Let’s do it again.’

This wasn’t going too well. Jimmy carried on walking: he thought it best not to get bogged down here if possible. But there was a part of him that had other ideas.

‘I’m sorry, Strauss, I won fair and square. I enjoyed the game very much, though, so thank you. In fact, I’d planned my attack more than two weeks ago because you’re quite predictable really. And even if I wanted to play again, I’ve got an exam tomorrow so I want to go and get myself ready. Besides, I’ve just seen a bloke in overalls take a paintpot and a stepladder into Hall.’

‘You little shit. I don’t care about him and his fucking stepladder. I’m going to beat you in front of the whole school and get your cunt of a name off that board. Now move!’

It was going a whole lot better now. Jimmy stopped and turned to face the snarling beast.

‘You really need to be able to take defeat with a bit more grace, Strauss. It might happen to you again at some point in the future; you never know. Especially if you continue to play chess. You should be able to say out loud, so that all the world can hear: “Yes, I was beaten by a superior opponent who not only anticipated and countered my whole game plan, but was well enough prepared to respond to any contingency plan I may have hastily formulated in my abortion of a brain, that is if I hadn’t been panicking so much and had retained the facility to conjure up even the most basic token response. Breathtaking arrogance can only get one so far in life and I need to understand that, once that level has been reached, some form of substantive contribution is required to progress any higher. I hope I’ve now learned my lesson and it makes me a better person all round.”’

The expectant-eyebrowed hush was definitely there but it didn’t last long, punctured as it was by an impromptu and pretty unscientific measurement of the forced vital capacity of Jimmy’s lungs. Moments later he heard a sharp crack as a size 11 on the rise met his ribcage – good to know that his hearing was still unimpaired.

The first thing to do was to get out of range; any more of that and he’d be toast. Rufus advanced unhurriedly after his retreating prey, half acrobat, half crab, with nothing written on his face but total destruction. What a piece of shit. If Jimmy couldn’t get his act together quickly they’d be scraping him from the inner lining of his uniform. He was in some kind of pain, especially when he moved or stood still, but he was sharp enough to flap the next left-handed haymaker off to safety and take his chance. A left hand of his own caught that big ugly cheek flush. And hurt. Rufus’s head stayed pretty much where it had been, anchored by its great bull neck, but his mouth flew independently across the left side of his face, spewing incidental red-flecked spittle. Finally it settled, uneasily, back to its usual berth and Jimmy found out what Rufus looked like when he was really angry. Hideous. Probably for the first time ever, his eyes betrayed genuine human emotion. The two involuntary nascent tears were almost incoherent in their silent cacophony of pain, confusion, hatred, indignity and sorrow for what the rest of the body was just about to inflict on another living thing. They would have been as burning rivers, desperately slaking those eyes which still retained the intensity to burn into Jimmy’s conscious self. Would have been, because there was no time for them to run off, as an accompanying right hand careered into the nose between them. The elephant was floored and bloodied. Incidental spittle was the least of the onlookers’ concerns as they wiped spatters from their eyelids and chins. Rufus was held up, or held back, nobody was sure, by three or four acolytes, Jimmy stood his ground for a few vital seconds, turned slowly and walked away. Almost all of his body hurt, although he was diagnosed with no more than a single broken rib, three broken knuckles and light scarring to the soul that would heal reasonably well. They never spoke of each other again.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

The surprise of stumbling on his one-time adversary was neither a pleasant nor an unpleasant one for Jimmy. He was convinced that the whole episode would be one that Rufus would have dismissed from his mind a long time ago, along with his very existence. Certainly, the easily superior air coming off him right now suggested that he’d managed to put it behind him, although clearly something was bothering him and causing the tension that had initially jolted Jimmy out of his travails.

Of more import, and slightly more disturbing, was the character directly opposite the mighty Rufus and to Jimmy’s immediate right. Doolan McKendrick had been a part of Jimmy’s life much more recently and had had an even more positive influence on the thoughtful and inquisitive young man. In fact, he had been responsible for such a fundamental change in Jimmy’s Weltanschauung that he surely ranked among the most important few people he had ever encountered.

He was nose-deep in The Economist, which was about as surprising as it was appropriate. He had always been one for ill-fitting journals, mirroring his eye for an off-the-peg suit. Jimmy’s first experience of him had begun with the sentence: “I like things kept simple and to the point – 4 or 5 Powerpoint slides is always enough to get the message across.” Jimmy looked around hopefully, but his heart sank as he realised there was nobody else present. For anyone so dull-witted to now genuinely be following the train of a technically involved 2000 word article written by an acknowledged expert was an impossibility. There was absolutely no chance whatsoever that Doolan was even reading, let alone understanding what was written on that sheet of paper. But he was probably fooling the others in the carriage, the thought of which was almost enough to make Jimmy nudge the sharp-faced, freckled and ice-skinned guy on his left or the gorgeous but uneasy city doll opposite and ask them to get Doolan to explain exactly what it is he’s reading. But he didn’t, of course. That sort of thing never happened.