ISLINGTON

You can’t cheat at chess [although Bobby Fischer once accused Boris Spasky of yoghurt communication during the 1972 World Championships] for all the askance glances and kibitzed comments of your opponent and his entourage. Of course for everyone who loses, usually by observable degrees, there is the pretence of bravado, of stoicism in the face of defeat and the suspicion that the opponent is cheating by virtue of an advanced brain, a siftingrecalibrating intelligence that defies logic, is logic, is virtually automaton. The ancient Asians knew the rules of cheating - always seat your opponent with the sun in his eyes. Even then the home turf advantage was worth a goal or two.

‘Go on, find an answer to that.’

The bald head bobbed above the shuffling feet, that little pyrotechnic dance of shifting pebbles. A probing sun ray lit up the bare pate like a beacon casting a long decorous shadow across the board. The phallic lumpiness of a castrated bishop now occupied a new spot.

‘Just hold your horses and for god’s sake keep still while I’m thinking.’

The variegated crowd murmured from beneath assorted hats and shifted in their fixed positions. On either side a small stand rose up three tiers high. At either end a solo platform afforded an aerial view. He wiped a casual hand across his brow and was surprised to find it damp. Momentarily distracted he looked up as if to discover the answer to the unasked question. The blinding light caught him by surprise.

‘Need some fluid.’

What he didn’t need were difficult questions to add to the already overlong list swirling in his brain. What did it mean to be nearly as old as the hills? What did it mean to be any age? Why was he concerned with negotiating the battleground of immortality? Why he was playing chess at all? He glared at Otello eight squares away, fed up with being behind yet again and settled on gamesmanship. Bodily he picked up the white bishop, only recently moved by his opponent, and placed it in the exact centre of the square.

‘The least you can do is be a bit more precise. How am I supposed to know which square it’s on when half of it is hanging over the edge?’

‘Bishop to knight five and play it where it lands.’

He sluiced his parched and constricted throat with warm beer and curled his lips in disgust.

‘This stuff tastes like warm piss.’

‘If I were as obviously familiar with such a taste as are you then I might agree.’

Harold sniffed. His best weapon with playing black - clog the centre with pawns until the whole game became a constipated draw. He had gone wrong somewhere. Ruefully he eyed the two dead soldiers standing at attention on the western end of the board.

‘I see you are examining my spoils. A master would say that the game is over with one unanswered pawn let alone two. What do you say?’

‘Fuck off is what I say and let me think.’

He retired to the top of the black podium and scraped disconsolately at his stubbled chin. Madelaine hates stubble. Maddy sniffs his armpits and checks his toes for fungus. Mad knows the future. At forty he thought he knew the future, at fifty the dimensions of forty diminished. He had predicted an easy shift into his prime while she moved staggeringly through the change. He was wrong. She made the major decision to remove all that cluttered and troublesome plumbing and positively glowed. A hand through his remaining thinning hair and the evidence of the bespeckled pillow each morning told a different story of slow decay. He resolved to visit Candice. Candice would cheer him up.

‘You going to move?’

‘Enough to trounce you in four.’

It was all bluff now. Convince your opponent that he has missed something, that there is a master plan so deep that he hasn’t seen it...

He couldn’t get his mouth wet no matter how much beer he poured down his aching throat. The ball of fire above now threatened to cook the plaza. Just when did a square become a plaza, just when did the perfectly satisfactory English term for a bland piece of real estate take on pretensions of cosmopolitan Europe? He blamed the EU. Eurodollars, euroconsciousness, europissoirs, eurocafeculture, europasteurisation, eurohomogenisation. It was Yugoslavia all over again. Jam all these disparate nations together, tell them to speak one language, ignore the pretensions of religion to dominate under any circumstances and wait for the sparks to fly. Everyone knew what you got then - you got the Mostar Bridge. For centuries it was a piece of divine culture linking two sides the river and then it became a target. Everybody regretted the necessity, as it crumbled into the river Neretva below.

Harold resolved to attack and break a few of the bridges Otello was making into his defences. Jumping off his private podium with what he thought must look like athleticism to the several dozen audience still murmuring in the background, he grasped his Queen by her trident [who designed this monstrous set, some latterday Victorian immersed in Boudiccan mythology?] She settled uneasily in the middle of the board bristling with power but with little purpose but to intimidate. The crowd raised its collective voice and eye and like in a slow-motion tennis match followed the ball to the opposing baseline expecting it to kick off the grass. [ hadn’t Madelaine said that they had tickets for Wimbledon again, four hours of torture as two sweating protagonists whacked a tiny ball into submission?]

He peered into the face of his friend and donned a baseball cap salvaged from a cupboard after years of dustgathering and an abortive trip to the States to be at the opening of his one and only New York show. The owner had thrust it on his head in a fit of American-Anglo relations and then laughed like a drain at the incongruity of the monkey suit and cap. [a hired monkey suit, mind you, too long in the cuff]

‘Sun’s not too much for you, is it? I should think that glowing coconut must be about cooked by now.’

Otello climbed his podium disdainfully and pulled an Australian bush hat out of a bag.

‘I too have cultural connections my friend,’ he stated haughtily and adjusted the angle to a slouch.

‘You’re not telling me that you think Australia has a culture - it’s still cringing and kowtowing to England even now, this close to the millennium. It’s barely off the tit.’

‘I choose to adopt its freespirited nature at this juncture, its blase attitude to authority, its blithe open spaces...’

‘You’ve never even been there. The closest you’ve come to Aussie consciousness is the Walkabout pub.’

He indicated the well-known wateringhole across Islington Upper Street with its bare floor and large screen TV showing fuzzy sports pictures in the back corner. He’d seen part of the Grand Final of that anarchic game Aussie Rules one Sunday afternoon amid a hundred beer-swilling patrons trying to conjure up some semblance of home. One of them had explained that you couldn’t push a man in the back, [that constituted a free kick] but apparently two feet between the shoulder blades, a swift elbow in the eye and a shirtfront tackle which rocked the opponent’s head back on his shoulders at the opposite end to the ball action, were all acceptable.

‘Knight to bishop seven, check. I think your lady is in trouble.’

Harold followed the meandering paths of the white knight and saw the fork. Not only was his queen in trouble but a rook would follow on the next fork.

‘I suppose you expect me to resign at this point.’

‘It might save further embarrassment.’

He surveyed the area alongside the Chapel Market with its plethora of antique shops smugly tucked away in corners, its attempt at greenery with a pitiful park of fenced concrete and grass pushed dankly upwards by tree roots, its pretentious to literary culture [one bookshop], artistic culture [one gallery], shopping paradise [mostly shoe shops and fast food emporiums it always seemed to him], its pretence to another Petticoat Lane hidden back from Upper Street [another dozen shoe shops ranged alongside the temporary stalls swilling in their own rubbish], and realised why he loved the place. It felt comfortable. It had all the hallmarks of a worn pair of shoes recently decorated with new buckles, best of both worlds really. Suddenly the beer tasted sour in his mouth and he eyed The Kings Head wistfully.

The Kings Head had stood on this spot since at least 1806, according to the blurb, with its fireplaces, engraved windows, mock Corinthian columns and dark varnished wood, to say nothing of a ghost. These days it had a Celtic touch with Irish barmen and carved latticework at either end of the central bar. Brass lights hung and stood. Food was perched on a servery while the end of the bar was littered with sauceboats, condiments in some sort of pattern, and cutlery folded neatly into napkins and stored upright in glasses. Small round tables crammed into even smaller spaces between the centralised bar and the perimeter which trapped patrons in the curved, walled booths so ordering was a matter of shouting over those standing and having glasses passed head-high in exchange for money. Harold always felt comfortable here with its lack of contrasting tone and red velvet curtains interspersed with the green wallpaper. It could have been described as cosy and claustrophobic. Visiting Americans bitched about the lack of space, the bland food, the pall of cigarette smoke, and took endless pictures of each other in clustered groups. The word of the moment was inevitably ‘quaint.’

‘Time to call it a day and whet our whistles Otello.’

‘You mean you’re resigning?’

‘Let’s say I’ve had enough of wasting my Saturday morning. If you want to claim victory then so be it.’

‘I so claim.’

There was a ripple of applause as the protagonists shook hands on the board and bowed to each other Japanese style. As if on cue a cloud obscured the sun.′

‘See that, even the god’s think it’s time to quit.’

Both men looked upwards and raised hats to the sky. Otello’s bald head and darkened Italian skin glistened. Two rows of perfectly matched teeth, not all his own, shone too beneath the obligatory moustache. The remaining puffs of black hair above his overlarge and protruding ears, Harold suspected some darkening agent but had never been able to catch him at it, stood out like spring-growth bushes.

‘Another win to me. If we were keeping score I might say that you’re lagging behind somewhat.’

In fact Harold hadn’t won a game in recent memory on the small or large board and had been regularly beaten on level one by the chess computer Otello had presented him with on his last birthday.

‘Never mind, there’s always next week.’

‘I might not live that long. That’d put pay to your cockiness wouldn’t it.’

‘Right, time for a drink, you’re buying.’

Of course the millennium was a fact, incontrovertible, unassailable. The fact that half the world’s computers would crash because of inattention to distant details decades before didn’t lessen the impact or ameliorate the probabilities of ageing rapidly. The truth was that there seemed to be a hastening towards 2000, an earnest desire to get there quickly, to get it over with, to run rapidly over the invisible time- line and claim victory. Millions would of course, claim victory that is, just for getting there, being there, and not having done much more than survived. It had become a justification for living, to be able to say ‘I was there at the opportune moment and now I can relax, safe’. Even a cursory look at history would announce the possibility of another BIG ONE after the war-to-end-all-wars took everyone by surprise in 1914 and reverberated on for decades. Art of course was different. It took on a pessimistic look, saturated itself in pathos and misery while proclaiming its righteousness. It was as if the whole art world had claimed simultaneously that public masturbation was mandatory and then become indignant that society didn’t agree. Harold the artist contemplated the approach of the new millennium with as much pessimism as he could muster. After all, being sixty was the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning or just the end, as he decided that a pint simply wouldn’t be enough when your opponent was loaded with excess readies.

Madelaine Hackett looked at her husband and also wondered which century he was living in. Doggedly he had hung onto an archaic academic style while the whole artistic community had moved on. That most of them had gone mad in her opinion was beside the point but then, where had it all got him? On the toilet wall still hung the small nude he’d done of her in the Coldstream style back in the sixties. Taught, sparse lines barely lifting her form away from the background. Taught breasts, even tauter stomach, long neck. There was another one upstairs in the little studio, just the same; same size, same pose, same colouring, different model. She suspected infidelities; she agonised over rumours but most of all she thought about disappointment. She sighed and absentmindedly flushed the toilet while still sitting on it. The shock of cold water stood her up like a ramrod and she looked down ruefully as the tide swirled.

That morning she’d read of the Pistol Star, what scientists were calling the brightest and biggest in the known universe, in fact ten million times more powerful than the sun and big enough by comparison to engulf the orbits of Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars. The Pistol Star however was unleashing as much energy in six seconds as the terrestrial sun does in a year and would consequently becomes a super nova in three million years. She immediately thought of the ‘Millennium’ exhibition currently creating shock waves amongst the more conservative at the Royal Academy. Just another bright star about to blow itself to oblivion she decided. The fact that Harold, Harry, or whatever he was calling himself this week could never be a supernova, had never been a supernova, but by the same token was worth about six seconds in bed, was a source of ongoing bitterness on her part. After all, she’d read all those tales by the wives of Picasso about his overabundant prowess, noted the progeny he had fathered at 80, seen the film, Surviving Picasso twice [without Harold who wouldn’t watch the ‘old prick’] and put herself in their positions having convinced herself that she would have done so much better given the chance. Instead she had Harold who seemed to have the endless energy when it came to pursuing other women, but barely rated a mention in the annals.

As she hauled up her kickers and rearranged her skirt she stared menacingly at the painting before her eyes. If mere inanimate clouds of dust could self-ignite their own hydrogen and provide light and heat enough for a galaxy why couldn’t Harold at least light up part of Islington long enough for someone to take notice? True, he’d had that show in an obscure part of New York but even the reviewers had failed to comment, let alone anyone buy anything.

Of course, of course, Madelaine didn’t much care for pubs and rarely went even when Otello could round up his wife for companionship. Nowadays the Hacketts and the Brancaleones seldom met as a foursome. Domenica was inevitably busy or preoccupied. Madelaine said, in her own defence, that alcohol upset her stomach, something he knew to be a recent invention, as recent as the last glass of secreted wine from the bottle of white in the kitchen cupboard. Of late he had taken to marking the bottle label out of sheer devilry to check. Maybe he could score a debating point in the future should the need arise. Domenica on the other hand knew all about pubs and bars of the cocktail kind, discrete wateringholes, plush glitzy places above casinos - in fact she could be described as something of an authority on ambience.

The Kings Head had ambience inside, not that Domenica or Madelaine frequented it, but not outside. On the forecourt there was the row of traffic noise, passing drunks and the whirling dervishes of unnamable rubbish flowing down Islington High Street. Inside there was the constant pall of cigarette smoke so thick you could cut it with a knife and die of cancer without ever having taken a puff. Then there were the odorous wafting vapours of Guinness and the tasty, tangy nostriltinglers from the food buffet.

It being Saturday lunch they settled for the wooden trestles on the forecourt.

‘A pint is it? You can tell me how the painting is going afterwards,’ said Otello with a knowing smirk on his face.

The painting wasn’t going. The most he’d done in a week was to clean his brushes and have a strained conversation with his usual model who told him she was pregnant. He inquired, pointlessly, if it was his, but knew it couldn’t be after all the time that had passed and wasn’t surprised to find out it wasn’t. He’d followed the new romance for months like a soap opera and was worried that he’d started to see his immediate world in the truncated, one dimensional language of television - the death of art in his opinion. The blow by blow arguments had been protracted and described in increasingly graphic terms during painting sessions, which he had always regarded as sacrosanct or at least an escape from the mundane. However, there was a certain fascination that appealed to him in having someone’s life recreated in words and the odd spicy bit did more than titillate his fancy.

On the subject of titillation, he still stopped by the newsagent every Friday and roamed through the unpackaged soft porn. The death-warmed-up Indian behind the counter hadn’t dare say anything with his yellowed schlera barely visible against his pockmarked face even if in Harold’s opinion, he was dying to to make some disparaging remark. After all with his profit margin Harold reasoned, any lost sale could mean the beginnings of bankruptcy, Harold promised himself that one day he’d buy one just to see if the Indian’s face changed expression but never seemed to have more than a few coins of loose change on him. After all it was Friday and Madelaine took all available cash and went shopping in Tesco’s at Kingsland on Fridays. Madelaine amid the blazing colour of the African women of Hackney. Madelaine rubbing shoulders with the West Indian contingent, always large, black, outragous and permanently laughing She was slim, white, elegant with no sense of humour let alone colour sense. He shook his head in amusement that in that shopping arena she must stand out like a bandaged thumb.

‘So, how is the painting going, well?’

Harold fought back a sudden attack of the beery burps.

‘Good thing the ladies aren’t here Harry. What would your Madelaine say at this point?’

Glad to be away from the subject of his painting, or the lack of it, Harold launched into a set piece on his wife. Otello had heard it all before, several times, but laughed anyway and reciprocated with one of his own. Harold released a knot of wind as if in punctuation.

‘She wouldn’t appreciate that either. Better out than in. And what would your poet have to say at this juncture should he choose to honour us with his presence?’

‘Ah, Dante. Indeed.’

‘Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch’ertrate.’

‘Which means?’

‘All hope abandon, ye who enter here.’

‘Oh, very funny. You don’t see anybody here complaining. Madam, does my presence offend you?’

A well-dressed women in designer jeans and a Versace scarf looked suitably taken aback and fumbled a reply with the help of her husband. Harold didn’t listen but moved on to an elderly drinker with cloth cap and gaberdine raincoat more dressed for winter than August, and not just any August, but one of the driest on record.

‘You sir, do you find me offensive?’

The man merely turned his back and shrugged, the raincoat fabric shaping across his shoulders

‘See, no one finds me offensive.’

‘Cheers,’ said Otello.

‘Likewise,’ said Harold.

Whichever way he measured it Candice was, in his judgement, a snob, feckless, finicky, in a permanent state of fantasy, disorganised, incapable of telling time or keeping appointments. Harold saved her up for rainy days and since London could be relied upon to conjure up at least two or three in any normal week, there were weeks when he seemed to the neighbours, who kept tabs on these things, to be living there. Some assumed he was a visiting elderly relative and he’d play the game by turning up with an affected shuffling gait in a cardigan moth-eaten at the elbows and in need of a wash. The Renault 2CV added to the image. Only yuppies with more money than sense greeted this ageing corrugated mousetrap as a classic. They prominently displayed the names Daisy, Gertrude and Gwendoline on the coachwork like a parade of maiden aunts. Harold had sandpapered the name off his long ago and simply referred to it as ‘that bitch’. Of course it responded in kind by jamming the driver’s door open, the passenger window shut, by dropping a gear as he approached traffic lights and shifting like a crab around easy corners so that he had to fight with the wheel to avoid sideswiping the odd arrogant Mercedes, or worse still, a new Peugeot with its computer-run interior and electric sun roof. It cost five hundred pounds just to have a mechanic look at one of those. Mechanics invariably sniffed and walked around the 2CV. One had once asked in superior tones for the can opener before giving the front tyre a kick. For a week afterwards the temperature gauge kept shooting up into the red in protest sending an easily panicked Harold into paroxysms of shivering, sweaty palms and a racing heart beat convinced that ‘that bitch’ was going to blow up with him inside it.

Candice Figgur occupied three rooms up Kingsland Road. Passengers on the 22A and the 22B buses got a good look in through her windows from the top deck as the bus alternately scythed its way through parked cars or came to a grinding halt right outside the door because the owner of Majestic Shoe Importers had asserted some arbitrary right to plant his Audi outside the roll-up door despite the fact that both double yellow lines and a redmarked bus zone said he couldn’t. At least ten times a day an exasperated traffic warden wrote out a ticket and allowed the wiper to slap against the windscreen hard enough to snap it. [She always looked around for the owner first.] He merely tore up the notice and consigned it to the gutter. It was a mystery to the fish shop on one side and the afrohair place on the other why he’d never been clamped.

So Harold had these rainy day appointments, not that Candice had ever worked it out, he thought in all honesty. He’d tell Otello that he was going round to ‘give the bitch one’ but it was never as simple as that. Candice wanted. Wanted what? Well anything would do. A trinket from down the market, a bottle of cheap plonk, any flower at all as long as it was red, a Mills and Boon, a stick of salami, a couple of peppers, underwear, something from the sweetshop down Dalston lane. All of these souvenirs [literally ‘memories’, from the French] were stored in boxes covered in coloured cloths and decorated with bows, ribbons and paper curlicues. In the hands of a different kind of artist than Harold this collection could have become a meaningful installation plumbing the depths of multiple levels of an eccentric personality but Harold’s interests were different. He made no secret of the fact that he was after her body - that he derived enormous pleasure from drowning himself in its milky hugeness, from exploring its crevasses with his fingers and tongue, from feeling its weight and solidity melt in his hands.