It’s late and there’s been a light rain for hours and I suspect after seventy pages of Less Than Zero that I won’t have anything to add to what I wrote on the second reading twenty years ago.
2001
19 August, Sunday
Finished Less Than Zero (again) tonight, fifteen years on (almost exactly). Some of the products have vanished (e.g. Betamax, Tab), some are absent because their time had yet to come (e.g. CDs, mobile phones). I remembered the name of the girl (Blair), the suntan lotion, the snuff film, the twelve-year-old girl tied to the bed, the turning on of MTV (with the sound turned down), the elusive ‘friend’ and the dead body in the alley with a cigarette left in its mouth. Certain phrases and lines came back to me too as I read and it was funnier* than I remembered, deadpan funny, but I don’t think there really was anywhere to go (for Ellis) after that. I’d forgotten that he goes back to his old elementary school near the end. It [i.e. the cumulative effect] remains numbing; an extreme on a spectrum against which one can measure other ways of life.** Serial killing isn’t a way of life, no matter if the protagonist is a yuppie.
*Two examples are the photographer and the psychiatrist.
** One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and everything in between. I wouldn’t include Auschwitz, where, as Primo Levi observed, “mental illnesses were healed” (The Drowned and the Saved, p. 65).
John K, being short, was lifted off his feet and carried away in the surge. Inside, there was any amount of bottles, stones and coins thrown onto the field or just used to pelt the kids hanging on the fence at the shed end. Paolo Rossi scored a penalty early on. When he was taken off later, he walked down the crowded touchline and one of the many well-wishing hands almost pulled him into the crowd. There was a mob stamping on the roof at the shed end. A chap with an upturned collar, a sports jacket and a beer bottle managed to get over the fence and stood talking to the Italian goalkeeper, who was leaning against a goalpost beside him. Play continued down the field. He offered the goalie a swig. The Italian politely shook his head but that much at least was all very convivial.
Here is a look back at the night from the Irish Independent of 6 October 2009.
A Nineties documentary on the building boom in the City of London revealed that the tallest of the three blocks in Minster Court had become known to the suits as Dracula’s Castle. By the time of the broadcast (1993) the block overlooking the Thames had already seen restoration following a serious fire. On TV, the empty halls were like The Shining. Twenty per cent of the office space was then unoccupied.
In November 1989 I started as a chainman on this site near Tower Hill. On my first day, I saw the pools of water with cables lying in them like creepers in a swamp. I saw the generators and the clumps of rusting steel rods. I heard the rasping of angle grinders and the constant banging of the ‘guns’ tightening nuts on steel columns. I saw the sparks flying and landing in the water and looked up at the tower cranes that swayed ominously on windy days.
The warm engineering hut was a sanctuary of instruction, first thing each morning. Outside, the early sun was dazzling, bouncing off the Thames beyond Tower Bridge as I felt the cold steel under my arse. Two hours later all the men lined up in the darkness under the block nearest the river to wonder would those ahead of them ever get served and move the line on a bit. The figures had faces of stone and bodies wrapped in heavy clothing. Inside the huge prefab the light was a bit warmer. When the breakfast trays were full we found tables and sat down without a word. When the scraping of cutlery on the plates began, so did the conversations about confrontations, near-falls, mistakes and final warnings.
In the dark by a railing on the Castle, builders in a lengthening line of helmets, like troops in a trench, watched a man and woman in a fifth-floor office across the street. By the third evening a surprising number of men were slow to clock out but by then the novelty of the desk was evidently wearing off on the woman, who resisted the ongoing advances of her secret lover.
On foggy evenings, Tower Bridge and its lights reminded me of one of those Whistler Nocturne paintings. A month was left of the Eighties. The psychology of steel: fear kept me careful. I climbed up on the ninth floor of the Castle, partly to practise and challenge myself to the test. To stay up too long brought on stiffness and that had to be avoided. After a spell above and the resulting buzz, the ground felt unreal.
My confidence on the steel grew. Up there I always kept at least two limbs firmly fixed. It was pointless looking down. The world had to be only the few feet of space in my immediate vicinity. I tied my glasses around my head so as not to be distracted by the thought that they might fall off.
A week before Christmas, Ryder, the top man, caught me walking on top of eleventh floor steel without a harness. You’re not to do it anymore, lad. Walking top flange. I was glad to be working for an English firm. The hours were long but the money was alright. It was a bit different from having to go looking for wages in some pub in Kilburn or Archway.
The first morning back in January the site was all water. I stepped into a box called the man-rider and a tower crane lifted me, J. and a couple of steel erectors over fourteen floors like a balloon trip until we were looking down on the skeletal frame of the angular roof of the Castle. There it dropped us off to do a job. Sometimes perhaps I enjoyed working on that site. It was just the horrible first ten minutes of consciousness in the mornings.
A pretentious fart worked part-time at Minster Court because his brother was an engineer of importance. There was a problem with a column overlooking a street and he and J. were about to take a sledgehammer to it. I stood back with some welders. The fart was first up. He missed the column completely and clipped the side of J’s hardhat.
Outraged, J. grabbed the sledge and he took a swing but managed to catch it in the hollow. It spun out of his hands and looped over the side of the building, fortunately landing just inside the hoarding. One of the welders gave me a nudge.
Are these two for real?
They’re available for weddings and parties.
Always game for a laugh, every time they saw an opportunity, the welders would lift sheets of decking where rainwater had gathered on high floors. They poured it over the side, down onto my compatriots – mostly angry men from Clare – laying concrete far below.
The basement at Minster Court was an awful place. It was some hole. The mudmen down there didn’t even know I was Irish, like them. To them I was just an intruder from the light. Most days I was doing something terrifying to most people, at first sight, but whenever I was down there, facing that black horizon, that firmament, with piss holes reeking in a deep, damp chill, it wasn’t physical courage I needed.
A. wheeled a bike onto the site, to order, having lifted it from outside Fenchurch Street station. Many bicycles were chained outside the station but the site had all the relevant gear, such as clippers and pliers. He was nineteen and living with his girlfriend, his “old woman” as he called her. His dad’s word was gospel. His dad was doing well. He asked about a name for the baby soon to arrive.
If it’s a boy, roi’, I wanna call ’im Chawlie, but if it’s a girl, she wants to call ’er Chanel. Is that oroi’?
I shrugged.
What do you think, yourself?
I mean, it sounds like a perfume. It is a perfume, innit?
It was A. who went on to show me fresh, unwrapped, uninstalled kaze cabins to kip in on some high floor. A quick kip in this or that toilet cubicle lifted the spirits whenever that was needed. I took a red marker from a pocket on waking up. Soon the Yorkshiremen could be overheard speaking fondly of a large cartoon on the white wall of a certain cubicle. Inspired by a true story, it had our leader throttling his counterpart among the Derbyshire deckers. The caption read, Ryder’s New Work Incentive Scheme.
Ryder saw it too. I know what they say about me. Thus he even mentioned it to me in the pub one evening, not knowing the artist, at least not for certain. The cartoon?But that’s not hostile, Keith. He seemed convinced after I added that, given that the victim had even complained about me, for using one of their hardhats, he had undoubtedly earned a spot of asphyxiation.
By late March the job seemed to have lost its urgency. Men were just standing around in groups. While overlooking the approach to the train station, Casper told me he was having second thoughts about getting a divorce because his wife had got herself a shop. That was one good reason. Many of the Yorkshiremen were ex-squaddies. Casper had twinkling eyes. He wondered why so many Paddies on building sites wore the jackets of old suits. The suit is the most democratic uniform. Even I had an old sports jacket.
Before the end, though, a gust of wind nearly blew me off an eleventh-floor beam into a lift shaft. I went over nearly forty-five degrees before the gust ceased and I straightened up again. Just like that. In a state of low-level shock for the afternoon, I found nobody made me go up on the steel again for the rest of the day. It was an unwritten rule. The next day my nerves were fine again but Ryder called me into his office. I was down the road on Friday. He knew I was going home anyway (April) and he explained that they had to get rid of some people as the steel work was winding down.
You’re a good lad. We’ll give you a few quid and a good reference and you’ll always be able to get a job with us again.
Dr. John Flynn 