Bad Actors полностью

A few streets off the Westway, where the city makes its bid for freedom with one last flourish of bookmakers and bed shops, bridal boutiques and barbers, in a single-roomed annexe occupying what was once the back garden of what was once a family home and now houses thirteen individuals leading thirteen separate lives, a figure lies on a bed, fully clothed, eyes shut, still breathing. How much of his current state can be put down to natural sleep, how much to alcohol-induced coma can be gauged by the empty bottle by his side: the label reads The Balvenie, a brand way too classy for this venue. The figure’s breathing is regular but laboured, as if heavy work were being done in that unconscious state, and the air it’s processing is thick with cigarette smoke—there’s an ashtray on the floor which needed emptying last Tuesday. One stub still smoulders, suggesting a recent companion, as it seems unlikely that the prone figure has been active these past few minutes. An unkinder view would be that it’s unlikely he’s been active this past month, but a bottle of scotch can have that effect, as indeed can two—a second bottle, equally drained, has rolled to rest under the room’s only table: a battered, tin-topped thing with foldable leaves.

Nothing else in sight gives cheer. Against the wall is a sink unit, on one side of which unwashed crockery mounts up on a stainless steel draining board, while on the other, a two-ring electric stove plugged into an already overworked socket offers just enough of a nod in the direction of domesticity to allow a landlord to describe the room as self-catering. One of the two rings is dormant, and on top of it has been placed a plastic bag of frozen chips, torn open at the wrong end. A little diagram explains how to prepare them: they can be cooked in an oven or on top of a stove, supposing a chip pan is available. A chip pan, as it happens, is available, and in fact is close at hand: it sits atop the second of the two rings, which is glowing orange in the dusky light, and the viscous liquid with which it is filled is beginning to bubble and pop, causing the pan’s wire basket to rattle against its sides. Spread out on the floor below is a newspaper, one of the capital’s giveaways, its pages unfurled and unfolded as if someone has been trying to read all of it in one go.

It’s a familiar scenario, this: a tabloid newspaper waiting to add fuel to whatever comes its way. Already a splash of oil has escaped the pan and landed on the ring with a big-snake hiss; not loud enough to penetrate a whisky fog, but a sign of more to come. The minutes will pass, shuffling their way towards the quarter hour, and before that milestone is reached the oil will have bubbled its way to freedom, at which point the minutes will give up, and the seconds come into their element. Things that were happening separately will start happening at once, and when the boiling oil spits onto the waiting paper, the paper will respond as it would to any good story and spread the news far and wide; across the threadbare carpet, over the shabby furnishings, and onto the figure on the bed itself, which might twitch of its own accord in its first few flaming moments, but will soon lose any such self-motivation and become the fire’s puppet, twisting and baking into a flaky black museum piece, while the annexe burns to a shell around it. All of this will happen soon, and some of it’s happening already. The oil burps in the pan, hungry. The cigarette stub smoulders its last, and a faint grey coil of smoke drifts towards the ceiling.

A few streets off, on the Westway, traffic roars into and out of London, embarking on an ordinary day.

But here in this cramped, shabby room, that day will never happen.