Читать книгу With a Zero at its Heart - Charles Lambert, Charles Lambert - Страница 6
Оглавление1
His first pair of long trousers are rust-coloured jeans his mother buys him from a catalogue. He’s ten years old, his legs are sweaty. He rolls the jeans up at the bottom, cowboy-style, and wears them with a brand-new green pullover from the same catalogue, then goes to play with his friend next door. He’s tense, excited. He feels that he has finally grown up. His friend’s mother opens the door to him, before calling up the stairs to tell her daughter he’s here. I hope you aren’t planning on doing anything dirty, she shouts, flicking ash into her free hand. Your little friend looks ready to muck out stables. He blushes. He hates the woman with all his heart.
2
He wants a velvet frock coat like the ones worn by The Kinks. He’s seen them in a shop down the road from Beatties, called Loo Bloom’s. He hadn’t noticed it before, but now he stands outside the window and stares at the mannequins for hours at a time. His favourite coat is burgundy crushed velvet, with metal buttons that go from the collar to the waist. He has no trousers he could wear it with, but that doesn’t matter, not yet. It will soon be Christmas. His mother hasn’t said no, which gives him hope. Christmas morning he unwraps a double-breasted jacket in dark green corduroy, which he hangs in his wardrobe that evening and will never wear again.
3
His friend next door has a room at the top of her house with chests full of clothes her family has collected. They spend whole days there dressing up, as pirates, duchesses, washerwomen, spies. Sometimes, alone in the house, they wander from room to room, inventing stories about themselves, inventing selves. One afternoon they leave the house. She’s chosen a cocktail dress that belonged to her mother, baggy at the chest, red stiletto heels. He is wearing a long gypsy skirt and a sort of bonnet that covers much of his face. If anyone stops them, they’ll say he’s her long-lost American aunt, but no one does. That evening, his father forbids him to see her and won’t say why.
4
It’s July but he still won’t take his blazer off. The playground is used by the first three forms; there are ninety boys in all. He is one of the youngest. They all have the same school uniform, grey trousers, white shirt, brown blazer with the brown-and-yellow badge, and yellow-and-brown striped tie. Even the socks have a brown-and-yellow stripe around the top. At morning break they’re allowed to remove their blazers and tuck their ties into their shirts, but he stands at the edge and watches the other boys in their white shirts and grey trousers, the younger ones like him still in shorts, and he won’t take his blazer off. He feels safer with it on. He is sweating.
5
He roots through his mother’s clothes until he finds one of her tops, a fine wool crew-neck pullover, salmon pink, identical to one Keith Richards is wearing in the November number of his Rolling Stones fan club magazine. He holds it against himself in front of his mother’s dressing-table mirror, then takes it into the bathroom to try it on. It’s cold, there’s no heating in the house. He shivers as he takes off his shirt and pulls his vest over his head. He puts on the top. His nipples poke out like disgusting unripe strawberries. He rips the top off and screws it into a ball, throws it behind the toilet. He’ll be in trouble but he doesn’t care.
6
He gets a Saturday morning job at Skinner’s hardware store, selling garden implements, screws and nails, buckets and brooms, household objects of various kinds. When he’s saved enough he buys a pair of genuine Levi 501s, a size too large because they’re supposed to shrink to fit. He gets them home and locks himself in the bathroom, fills the bathtub with water as hot as he can bear, strips to his skin, then puts on the jeans. They’re hard and stiff, and so is he. He eases himself into the water, wincing at the heat. When he’s lying in a cold bath, he gets out. The lower half of his body is stained indigo. The 501s hang from his hips.
7
At university he opens an account in a bookshop and another one at Austin Reed’s, gentlemen’s outfitters. The first things he buys with his cards are a book about the cultural revolution and a long green cashmere scarf. He twists the scarf twice round his neck, the fringed ends trailing like dangling vines. His hair is long and catches in the scarf; at night he picks out teasels of bright-green cashmere from the curls at the back of his neck, like decadent angel down. He’s sitting in the college bar and saying how much he would prefer to live in China. You don’t see people dressed like you in China, someone says. Really? he says, put down but also flattered.
8
Each Saturday afternoon they leave their cold water flat by the Arco della Pace. They cross the park, walking past De Chirico’s stranded figures in the drained pool. They leave the Castle with the room they call the knotted room behind them and cross the square until the Duomo is to their right and they are walking into Rinascente, and Fiorucci, and the smaller shops of the Galleria, and along Via Montenapoleone. It is summer and people are dressed in the colours of sorbet and ice-cream cups in small provincial cinemas from his childhood. Pistachio. Lilac. They shop for T-shirts and jeans and belts and sweaters. It is hot, and so are they, and they have no idea how hot.
9
The night he meets his true love he’s wearing a jacket he bought in a second-hand shop in Via del Governo Vecchio. It’s blue check, unlined cotton, and has a retro American feel about it that makes him feel sexy and ironic. He’s wearing it with a baby-blue Lacoste and a pair of chinos, the same beige as the beige in the jacket check, and Timberland boat shoes, without socks. It’s a warm evening, and he’s pulled up his jacket sleeves to show off his tan. It’s late April. Decades later, his only memory of what his lover is wearing is a cap, the kind people wear in Greece, and a smile, and the cap will be a false memory.
10
He visits the second-hand clothes market every Sunday morning, returning home with bargains he never wears, discovering them months later behind the sofa or under the bed, still stuffed into pastel-coloured plastic bags. A woman from Naples has a stall of suits, and he goes through a period of imagining himself as the type of man who wears nothing else, filling a section of his wardrobe with suits that are too small, too large, too formal, too spiv-like, too dull to wear. One day he finds a suit made by Valentino, a grey so dark it’s black, a wool so light it floats from the hand, the pockets still sewn shut. Weeks later, he wears it to his father’s funeral.
