RUNDLE

Quarter to seven on a Wednesday morning and I was driving home from work in the rain. At that time of day you get the cleaners, the security guards, the middle-class joggers in bright pink leggings, and the more burned-out ravers too, slouched-up, grey-skinned at the angled bus stop lean-seats, seeming somehow both shrunken and slackened, plucking anxiously at their polyester outerwear, and responding to everything on a one-second delay. 

Rundle waved me down. He was a bleary figure, skinny in the way old men get. It took three swipes of the windscreen wiper for him to cohere from a fluttering grey mass of damp cloth and bone into the person I knew. He had been my landlord four years previously, or rather I had been his lodger. My room in his flat was an awkwardly shaped mouldy space, up a short bent flight of stairs to a square landing of four-by-four feet, such that when I came out of my room I sometimes found myself looking down at him from an odd angle as he clattered around in the kitchen, not noticing me, the dark floorboards shiny under his socked feet. 

Two doors led off that landing: one to my room, one to the toilet. My bed was up against the wall and in the nights I would hear him sit, groaning, and quietly release into the water. When I came down in the mornings he would start off monologuing and never reply to a word I said. I never knew if this was because I was a tenant or a woman or both. He’d drink instant hot chocolates from dirty mugs, a lit cigarette or a Lost Mary in his free hand, and talk at length about the evidence of grand conspiracies against him. There were many unseen things determining his life. Ley lines were crucial to him. He didn’t believe in the Tarot. 

“They’ll get you for anything these days,” he always said. “Anything at all.” 

He got in the car and sat, silent and dripping, in the passenger seat, arms folded, bleeding water into the artificial fabric. I offered him coffee from my thermos.

“Had my toenails removed,” he said and drank. Then he said something which could have been had to or I’d to or had toe. He upended the thermos into his mouth and two tiny rivulets of instant coffee spread down either side of his chin, outlining the wrinkles and blank stubble there.

“Where can I take you?” 

“Lewisham flat.” 

I drove for a little while. I didn’t know what he was doing in Balham. 

“You reckon?” he said. 

“What?” 

“Are you loyal to the Chinese Communist Party?” 

“They haven’t done much for me,” I said. “Not lately.” 

He retreated into a sullen silence after that. Slowly the car started to smell like rain and something else chemical, bitter and indefinable. Outside the streets looked like metal.

“You’re quiet,” I said. “Usually such a chatterbox.” 

“You see funny people out this time of morning.” 

“I was just thinking that.” 

“I’m not rude,” he said. 

“Strange people,” he said. 

Then, again, he said, “Strange people. You want to keep away from strange people like that. Any time they try to talk to you, you look at the ground and you say sorry and you keep walking. You remember that. I’ve been keeping an eye on those keeping an eye and you don’t want to get involved.” 

I knew about strange people. I worked as a night receptionist at a twenty-four-hour luxury gym, but of course nobody comes past eleven, at least not to exercise. 

“You don’t want to be getting involved, at all,” Rundle was saying. 

I dropped him off and drove back through West Norwood and home to Mitcham. I slept for a while. It didn’t come easily. My muscles kept tensing me awake and the crevices of my body smelled strongly of salt. At twenty to eight I woke to house music and cookery smells, things frying. I ate. I went to work. I wasn’t thinking of Rundle at all as I did this but he was in my presence somehow, like some kind of social hangover. I came on shift at ten. 

A few hours passed by, slowly, reading stolen novels on a secondhand Kindle. The blank quality of the light in the foyer and the solid reflections in the big shop window gave the place an eerie, unmoving quality at night. On either side the walls were stippled at their midsections with small plastic squares painted in a faint reflective gold. Above this line, black paint. Below it, wipe-clean. 

At about two thirty I finished my book and looked up. I don’t know how long he had been there before I saw him. He was out under the bus stop opposite, dancing. He hadn’t changed clothes and he was dancing in place with jerking, distinct motions. His eyes seemed almost entirely glazed but he was dancing with a focus that I’ve never seen in a person, before or after. His coat was bunching around him and he was flinging himself around on the spot and it looked like there was something wet falling out of the folds of his coat and his trousers and landing in long dark flecks on the red metal seats and on the pavement. Through the window I could see my own image superimposed on his and the bright white light coming from the Domino’s behind him, the friendly fonts on the walls within. He was looking at me, and he was dancing. 

We watched each other for a long time. I stood up from the front desk and went and locked the electric double-door from a box on the wall. Still he was dancing in that painful rhythm.

Afterwards I went to the security cameras but the door was locked and nobody let me in. I jiggled the handle and heard nothing. It was like the room was empty. I never went in as long as I worked there. For all I know it was empty. There wasn’t anyone else around. It was very bright and I was alone among the gym equipment, the kettlebells and the slate coloured jigsaw mats. 

I would soon discover that it didn’t matter anyhow. The cameras didn’t work, not because of a momentary cutout, they just didn’t work. The next morning at the bus stop there was lots of rubbish where Rundle had been, plastic bags and things, and I kicked them away with my hands in my pockets, squinting against the morning. The seats and the pavement were spotted with dried globs of black wax.

I never saw Rundle again. Six weeks later I went to the seaside. In that time I found that he had taken on a strong psychological significance to me, one that I could intuit only dimly. I thought about him dancing all the time. Something about the specific motions of his body, not like a marionette, but something else I couldn’t identify. He appeared in my dreams. Never in his own body. Most often he came to me as a swatch of sodden polyester, seen very close up, such that the individual fibres were visible. For some reason this disturbed me deeply and I woke up sweaty and confused and lay there in the yellow-curtained light, me and my lower back pain and the sounds of my housemates in the walls, until the evening when I would have my breakfast and go to work. By this point I had already decided I was going to leave London. 

Nobody got on with me at Clapham Junction, and though it was a nice day the carriage slowly emptied station by station as we approached the seaside until I was sat alone. A long delay passed at Haywards Heath with slow, numbing warmth and a languid feeling, the sounds in my headphones lulling me more and more distantly until I wasn’t asleep but somewhere else entirely separate. I was nodding in the crook of my arm. I felt a comfort so complete and so final that it upset me to wake, then upset me to think about. 

This feeling followed me down through the North Laine and Kemptown as though tugged behind me on a string. The sunlight that day had an intense, shadowless quality I can’t fully describe. It smelled of burning plastic. A man spat and it landed in three distinct spots. No wind blew there. Streetsellers’ hands moved soundlessly on felt trays, slotting glass-stoned rings into place from thin plastic bags. 

I bought myself lunch on the seafront and carried it boxed in styrofoam onto a low boulder hill overlooking the beach. Yellow coins of lichen patterned the stones; old scratches and carvings were there. One said GR 85, the G and the R each made up of four straight lines. 

I sat to listen to my music and ate for a while in the sunshine, watching absently out across the beach, and the people laid there all unmoving on their bright striped towels. The parasols looked like trapped insects, all spindly, triangles of cloth pulsing subtly in place. Far off there was a mini-golf. It had been raining the night before and, in the bright day, the astroturf was visibly wet. The chainlink around it was wet. I looked back. The parasols were grey with water and the towels damp. They blustered together; the stones underneath me were dry, I thought, but beneath them moving water. 

The moment passed. I folded up my chips quickly and neatly in the box and walked to the station and went home. Of course it was a dry day. I was never sure afterwards if I was justified in the way I felt or not.