With a Zero at its Heart

Dedication

For my mother, Olive Kate Florrie Lambert (née Preece)

1916–2011

and my father, Vincent Lambert

1905–2006

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Objects or ghost balloons

Clothes or unripe strawberries

Sex or honey and wood

Travel or a harp embedded

The Body or this alien being

Danger or all that sweetness

Animals or the whelp of an alien god

Language or death and cucumbers

Money or brown sauce sandwiches

Theft or uniformly golden

Art or human-sized quilts

Work or but in the doing

Music or the global studio

Fear or the famished wall

Colours or cradling fire

Death or a sprig of leaves

Home or some other healing agent

Waiting or from star to star

Hunger or heavy bones

Nature or the purposes of love

Correspondence or coterminous with the cat

Cinema or what the centaur meant

Celebration or marking time

Books or utterly pliant and clinging

Coda or one bright brief beat

Also by Charles Lambert

Copyright

About the Publisher

1

He has never seen a ship inside a bottle but the day he discovers their existence he knows that he wants one more than anything in the world. He is seven years old. He imagines men no bigger than his fingertip working at the building of the ship, singing as they nail long boards to the hull and sew the rigid sailcloth panels for the mast, tall and straight as a tree, and coat the ship with burning tar to make sure it never sinks. He watches them gather on the deck. There is a bird above their heads. He imagines he is on a ship and there is glass all around him, as far as the eye can see.

2

He comes across the pendant in his great-aunt’s drawer. It is heavy, warm in his hand, the size of a just-fledged bird. At the heart of the pendant is the skeletal form of some insect, some winged insect, more than an inch long, longer than any insect he has ever seen, its flesh eaten out and engulfed by the same warm yellow that surrounds it. It is hollowed and sustained, its wings barely furled, it floats in this substance for which he has no name, which could be plastic but isn’t. There is a loop for a chain at the top, but he will never wear it. It is amber. The insect has been trapped inside for a million years.

3

His father buys him a bicycle, but it is the wrong sort. The bicycle he wants has swept-down racing handlebars and no mudguards and is green and white. This one has small wheels and can fold into two. It is the colour of bottled damsons. He pushes his new bicycle into the road and rides away as hard and fast as he can, but it is not fast enough; it will never be fast enough to escape the shame of the thing that bears him. His eyes are blinded by tears. When he skids and scrapes the skin from his arms he is glad. He shows his father the blood. This is your blood, he thinks but dare not say.

4

He finds an owl pellet in the barn beside his house. It is round, the weight of a dove’s egg, and roughly made, as though pressed from earth or some other substance he can’t identify. He does what he’s read in his book, soaking and prising it apart. Some of it crumbles and is thrown away, but he’s left in the end with a tangle of tiny bones, as fine as rain and puzzling, like a jigsaw without its box. One by one, he lays the bones out on his table until he finds at their heart a hollow skull, a jewel. That night he sees an owl swoop from the bare eye of the barn towards his bedroom window.

5

His favourite aunt gives him a typewriter. The first thing he writes is a story about people who gather in a room above a shop to invoke the devil. When they hear the clatter of cloven hooves on the stairs the story ends, but the typewriter continues to tap out words, and then paragraphs, and then pages until the floor is covered. He picks them up and places them in a box as fast as they come, and then a second box, and then a third. There is no end to it. I am nothing more than a channel, he whispers to himself, and the typewriter pauses for a moment and then, on a new sheet, types the word Possession.

6

He’s looking for Christmas presents in an antique shop behind the station when he sees a small, black lacquered box with a hinged lid. On the lid is a row of Chinamen. Their robes are exquisitely traced in gold, their wise heads tiny ovals of ivory, inset, like split peas bleached to bone. They seem to be waiting to be received like supplicants before an invisible benefactor, some mandarin perhaps. Many years later, the box survives a fire, but the shine of its lacquer is destroyed and the fine gold lines that delineate the robes of the men are seared away. What’s left is the row of heads, like ghost balloons, tethered down by invisible cords to the general darkness.

7

He reads his work at an international poetry festival. The local paper calls him a small, bearded man with one earring, which is two parts false and two parts true. At the party that evening, horribly drunk, coked-up, he pretends to adore the work of a Scottish poet, whose shallow musings he despises, and ignores the two poets he most admires out of shyness and misplaced pride. These poets both die soon after, the first beneath a passing car, the second alone, choked by her own vomit. He feels accountable for their deaths. He takes the reading fee he has been given and uses it to buy a Bullworker – a contraption of wires and steel that will make him invincible.

8

Before leaving the country he buys himself a single-lens reflex camera. It is more than he can afford, but how else will they believe him? Without the lens his eye is drawn by what moves, by skin and sinew and eyes and mouths, by the shifting of an arm against a table or the way one shoulder lifts without the other, but he’s too inhibited to photograph what he sees. He’s scared it might answer him back. Through his lens, what he sees is the perfect empty symmetry of doors and windows, and the way light catches the concrete of a bollard a boy has been sitting on moments before, the light still there, the warmth refusing to be held.

9

They live in a rented house with a billiards room, a spiral staircase and a ghost. The local laundrette is filled with drunken Irish poets. It is cold, and getting colder daily. When they’re forced to move, traipsing knee-deep in snow through the back streets of London, they take a single trophy with them, a Chinese duck with a pewter body, and brass wings and beak. The duck splits into two across the middle; they use it to keep dope, papers, all they need to hold the misery of their failure at bay. It is their stash duck and they love it. Everything else from that time has gone, everything except the ghost. The ghost is alive inside the duck.

10

His father keeps his ties in a flat wooden box. Each tie is tightly rolled, with the wide end at its heart. There are ties of all widths, all styles. His father throws nothing away and will never leave the house without a tie. The ties are held in place by a wooden grille, placed over them before the lid is closed. His father dies and he finds himself with the box of ties, many of them gifts he has bought at airports or hurriedly in shops he would normally avoid. He opens the box and rolls the ties open across his bed, their silk and wool a reproach to him as they wait to be taken up and worn.

1

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.

1

He sits in the middle of the living-room carpet, piling up wooden blocks that have letters pasted on their sides while his mother watches Emergency Ward Ten on the black-and-white set. He’s spelling out his name when one of the nurses says something about sex rearing its ugly head. He doesn’t know what this means but he can tell from the odd way his mother shifts in her armchair and glances down at him that it’s something bad. He waits for a moment, and then asks her why sex has an ugly head and what rearing means. She tells him he’s too young to understand. When he spells the word SEKS with his blocks she takes them away from him.

2

Visiting his aunt’s house, he plays with the daughter of the family two houses down. She drags him out of the house and into the outdoor lavatory, then lifts up her skirt and pulls down her knickers. They’re supposed to be where someone can see them, he says, but she reaches for his shorts and quickly, as though she’s done this before, unzips them and pushes them round his knees, then makes him sit on the lavatory. She squats on his lap, her shoulders against his jumper, and wriggles. He can’t see over her head. His face is pressed into the cotton of her dress as she leans back into him. Do you like it? she says. No, he says.

3

They’re in the greenhouse. It’s tomato season and they’re surrounded by tomatoes when his best friend suggests they play nudist camps. They take their clothes off and then stand there not sure what to do next. They don’t touch. It’s hot and the smell of the tomatoes is almost overpoweringly strong. After a while, she suggests they play charades. He watches her growl, her chest as flat as his, then mount the handle of a spade the gardener has left in the corner and run with it pressed between her thighs. She puts the spade down and mimes the opening of a door. I’m a book, she says, but he can’t guess which one. He feels faint. Everything looks red.

4

Some weeks later they’re in her playroom, at the top of the house. This time they both take off their clothes and get into bed. It’s a single bed, beneath the window. They lie there, shivery at first and then hot. She pushes his head down under the sheets until his mouth is on her tummy, then further down. There’s a sprinkling of hair he doesn’t expect, which tickles him and makes him want to laugh, but he’s scared as well. Kiss me, she says, and he does. Harder, she says, but he doesn’t know what she means. He struggles back up until he can see his watch. It’s time for Five O’Clock Club, he says. I have to go.

5

They stand in the tent his father bought for him, a tall square tent like the kind you see in films about knights in armour. They all have their jeans around their ankles. The tent is made of some orange material. One of them has a handful of pigeon feathers. The boys push the hard end of the feathers into the ends of their dicks until they stick. The girls put the hard ends into their slits. They wriggle their hips to make the feathers move from side to side. He’s told them it’s what Red Indians do, to show they belong to the tribe. Their skins are bathed in orange. They’re sweating. One of the girls starts to cry.

6

It’s a sleepover with one of his friends from school. They’ve been put in the same bed, a double bed, with a bolster and a quilted eiderdown. They start off in their pyjamas, but his friend waits until the house is quiet, then asks him if he’s still asleep. No, he says. Neither am I, says his friend. They lie together, listening to each other breathe. It’s hot, his friend says, and takes off his pyjama jacket. He sits up to do it, his slim bare chest turned silver by the moonlight. That’s better, he says. He gets out of bed and slips his pyjama trousers off, then gets back in. Aren’t you hot? he says. His hand is hard.

7

It’s the afternoon of the boat race. His father wants them to watch it together, but he goes upstairs and lies on his bed. After a while, he opens his fly and reaches in, stroking himself until he’s hard. He carries on stroking and something strange happens, like soft white feathers pushing to come out. For a moment, he thinks he’s about to pee, to burst with pee, and will flood the bed, but then he’s moaning and he has some white stuff on his belly. He’s so excited he runs downstairs. He wants to tell his mother, but his father catches him in the hall, and he has time to reconsider. You missed a grand race, his father says.

8

He’s in the common room, between classes. One of the boys is being picked on by a group of other boys for being cocky. He keeps his head down, he doesn’t want to get involved. He’s had his eye on the boy for some time. Short blondish hair, solidly built. He’s never spoken to him, but he has had a dream in which the boy’s dick looks like honey and a piece of polished wood all at once, and he is stroking it. When they wrestle him to the ground, his shirt comes out of the waistband and his torso arches back, bare-bellied, taut. The whole world and his heart are blinded by the light of the boy’s white skin.

9

He buys Health & Efficiency from a newsagent’s where he isn’t known. He cuts out his favourite images of men and sticks them into last year’s Stoke Arts Festival programme, alongside the underwear pages from out-of-date catalogues, a photograph of Kevin Keegan, shirtless, running across an empty field, a smaller photograph, scissored from the paper, of the dark one from Starsky & Hutch dressed up as Houdini, wearing chains around his neck and wrists, and not much else. He’s hiding a new copy of H&E in his satchel the day his mother tells him about a piece of pig’s liver in some friend’s fridge, so riddled with cancer it wrapped itself around the milk. For the protein, she adds darkly.

10

He’s sitting in the back of the car, reading Brideshead Revisited when he hears the thwack of a leather ball against a bat. He glances up. His father is driving through a village and he sees a game of cricket being played. He hates cricket, but he has a vision of waiting beneath a tree, a willow tree perhaps, with a hamper of sandwiches and champagne, and his friend is walking towards him, his bat beneath his arm, his cheeks flushed. He flops onto the picnic rug and his hair falls into his eyes as he reaches across, his hand barely brushing the knee of his friend, his lips slightly parted, his words the merest whisper. And so they come.

1

They’re driving home from the Isle of Wight. He’s never crossed the sea before and, although he knows the Isle of Wight is part of England, it’s as though he’s been abroad. His father has the radio on. Today’s the World Cup final and England is playing, but, maybe because he still feels foreign, he’s secretly siding with Germany. His father is getting excited, his sister is playing with crayons and paper, his mother is talking about finding somewhere to eat. He closes his eyes. They stayed in the Hotel Metropole and had a room with a balcony overlooking the sea. He made friends with a boy from London. When England wins, he shrugs. He knows he’ll go abroad again.

2

His first time in London his father takes him because he has work to do there. They go by train, the longest journey he’s made that isn’t in a car. He sits by the window and stares at the world, wondering what London will be like. When they arrive, his father takes him to Madame Tussaud’s. Years later, he remembers nothing of this, nothing of the waxworks or the chamber of horrors, only the train ride, which never seemed to end, and then the long wait outside the Planetarium, because his father had said he wouldn’t be long. But he is, and when he finally arrives there’s no time left to see anything, and his father keeps saying, I’m sorry.