Looking for Narnia

At the age of seven, George Wade had read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and for the remainder of his childhood, he had searched for the crisp white snow and forests of Narnia, rummaging in wardrobes for an escape.

Now, aged 40, he’d still have welcomed the discovery of Narnia. His was a nine-to-five world of tube travel and office work - cold calling people and trying to sell them products and services they didn’t want - and then home to his one-bedroom flat in Holloway – dismal Holloway, sometimes referred to as the armpit of north London.

Weekends were often worse. The routine of work might be tedious, but at least it gave him a reason to get up. On Saturday mornings he would wake with depression sitting on his chest like a fat, miserable cat.

He’d lie listening to the family downstairs going about their morning – chatting, arguing; the clatter of cutlery and bowls being washed, the slam of the front door and the sound of excitable feet running along the shared driveway. Sounds carried in old houses – they had not been built to be separate apartments. Sometimes he would pretend to be part of their unit or imagine he was tucked in his childhood bed listening to his own parents and siblings.

Details of the family’s life would float up to him like tempting aromas. He knew what time the father normally arrived home from work and the times each of the two young children went to bed; he sometimes heard messages left on their answering machine and the minor squabbles that broke out between them. Saturdays, they seemed to be at their loudest.

Today was a Saturday. He’d opened his eyes at the usual time, fat cat squarely in place, and considered staying in bed all day – just let the dregs of sleep pull him back into doze after doze until the day had drifted by.

From somewhere, he found the resolve to sit up, stretch and, finally, swing his legs over the side of the bed and rest his feet on the cold tiled bedroom floor. George had never heard of anyone tiling a bedroom floor, but his landlord had obviously been offered a great deal on terracotta tiles, because they covered every inch of floor space in the flat.

George shuffled across the hallway to the bathroom, which smelt of musty, damp towels. It stung, as always, as he urinated. He’d been to the doctor’s about the pain years ago, but the doctor had annoyed him, told him all his ailments – including depression – were down to excessive drinking. On average, George downed two bottles of wine a night.

As he shook himself dry, he heard water pouring into the bath downstairs and the mother calling to the son – Freddie – to come and let the water at least touch him before they left. They would be going to see the father’s parents in about an hour.

They always went on the third Saturday in the month, and that was today.

George scrutinised his face in the bathroom cabinet mirror. ‘I look like Shelley,’ he thought. Shelley was a character from a sit-com his mother and he had watched when he was a child. He’d never liked it. Shelley had been an unemployed intellectual, but basically a loser – a loser with saggy, dark bags under his eyes and no jawline.

Beyond his reflection he saw the panelled door set in the bathroom wall next to the toilet. It was an old door – maybe as old as the Victorian house. The cupboard was now used to store the hot water tank. Sometimes when he was really drunk he would imagine it was the door to Narnia – that he would open it and feel crisp snow under his feet and smell pine trees.

The morning after these evenings, he’d wake feeling pathetic. The cringe feeling once elicited by the memory of a drunken kiss, or singing too loudly on the way home from the pub with friends, was now borne from painful embarrassment at his own lonely existence and desperation for escape.

The woman downstairs was screaming. George stared at the bathroom floor, as if he could see through the hated terracotta to the flat below.

‘Just piss off!’ the woman screamed. There was an unhinged quality to it. He remembered screaming like this once, as Emma was leaving him. He’d stood in the doorway of their bedroom watching her pack and had fallen apart. He’d felt the disassembly of his mind and the screaming had risen from him like a siren. Emma had turned rigid, frightened eyes focussed on him as he sank to the floor like some soap opera queen, rage and fear distorting his face and body. He’d huddled in the doorway like a human draft excluder.

‘Piss off all of you! Just go!’ the woman downstairs yelled and George heard the man mumble something. George couldn’t hear what he said, but it seemed an inadequate response to such a feral outburst.

Seconds later the door to the downstairs flat opened and slammed shut and the sound of several pairs of feat clattered on the communal stairs. As the front door slammed, the woman’s screaming subsided into sobs.

‘I’ll be back in a week,’ Emma had said. ‘I’d like it if you were gone by then. This is my flat, remember.’

.

George met the woman from downstairs in the communal hallway that afternoon. He was on his way to the local Londis store to buy his Saturday evening quota of wine. She was struggling through the front door with two carrier bags – and judging from the clanking of bottles, she had bought a large quota of alcohol for the evening too.

She looked surprised to see him. Encounters like this were rare.

‘Hi,’ said the woman, as if unsure this was the right thing to say.

George said ‘hi’ back.

He held the door for her, looking at the floor,

feeling embarrassed that he knew so much about this woman, whom he’d never said more than a couple of words to.

‘Shit!’ suddenly, wine bottles were rolling across the hallway floor – one red, one white – and a tub of expensive-looking ice-cream tumbled onto George’s foot. One of the flimsy carrier bags had split. George felt as if he had seen something he shouldn’t have .

‘Sorry,’ said the woman, chasing after the escaping items, depositing a bottle into each pocket of her knee-length overcoat and turning her apologetic gaze on him. George smiled faintly, proffering the ice- cream.

‘Comfort food?’ he asked, immediately regretting it. He wasn’t used to spontaneous utterances.

The woman took the tub, blushing. She had very pale skin, George noticed, and very dark hair, cut boyishly short. Her eyes were outlined in dense black, the lids a vibrant green. She was actually quite exotic-looking. He’d never registered that before.

‘Did you hear us then?’ she asked. ‘I’m sorry about that. We never hear any noise from your flat. We thought you might have moved out – or died’

George had never considered the family downstairs actually being aware of him existing above them – let alone discussing him.

‘No, I’m still there,’ he said lamely.

‘I’d better get these things put away,’ she said, glancing upstairs as if she hoped a third person might appear to save her from this stilted conversation. ‘I’ve got three more bags on the doorstep.’

‘Can I help?’ asked George. It just seemed like the right thing to say.

The woman looked unsure, but politeness ruled and she smiled. ‘Thanks, if you’re sure.’

George struggled to hold the door open with one foot while lifting the remaining bags from the step. By the time he reached the first landing, his neighbour was already inside her flat.

‘Hello!’ he called, standing in the doorway, not liking to walk in uninvited.

He’d never seen the inside of the flat downstairs before. It wasn’t what he’d expected - no Home Sweet Home plaques on the wall, or paintings of inoffensive country scenes. Instead, almost every inch of wall space was covered in movie posters, theatre flyers and signed pictures of actors. Just inside the door, slightly overlapping a huge poster of Betty Blue, was a postcard-size signed photo of Dame Judie Dench, and a few feet along from the Dame, Jeremy Irons, looking characteristically sombre, and just by the living room doorway, Nanette Newman.

‘Nanette Newman?’ said George.

‘She was signing them for charity,’ said the woman, appearing in the doorway. ‘I felt obliged. I’m Susan, by the way – Susan, not Sue.’

George knew this, of course. He saw their post and once in a while the husband used her name. ‘George,’ he said and held out his hand.

Susan gave it a dainty shake, using the very tips of her fingers. She smelt of rich perfume which, George now noticed, swamped the room.

‘I like that name,’ she said, as if George needed reassurance ‘I knew the Boy.’

George frowned. ‘Which boy?’

‘Boy George. I was on the scene at the same time as him. Big hair, bad clothes, slutty make-up. I’m younger than him, obviously.’

‘Right, yes.’

‘Thanks for helping with the bags,’ said Susan. Gorge assumed this to be a dismissal and took

a step backwards towards the door.

‘You can have a glass of wine if you’d like.

Ben usually guzzles most of it before I get a chance.’ ‘Your husband?’

‘Never actually married, but he’s the father of one of the kids.’ Susan opened the bottle of red as she spoke. George felt the usual mini thrill as the cork popped. He never bought screw-tops. ‘I love the bones off them all, but sometimes I just need space, you know? Well. I suppose you don’t. Are you gay?’

‘What?’

‘It’s just that you’re on your own.’

‘Which means I must be gay?’

‘No, but it’s unusual for a good-looking straight guy not to be attached.’

George hadn’t considered how other people saw him physically for ages. He’d been concentrating on existing – getting from home to work and back again.

‘I’m not gay,’ he finally muttered. ‘Just single.’

Bad break-up?’ Susan handed him a very full, very large glass of wine and wafted over to one of the Chesterfield sofas that formed a right angle in the centre of the room.

‘Yes,’ said George. ‘So you and your partner haven’t split up then – just a blip?’

Susan gestured to the second sofa and George sat like an obedient pet. ‘Me and Ben won’t split, not yet anyway, I just blow up every now and then. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened before, all four of us cramped up in this little flat. We only meant to stay here a couple of months while I waited for a job to come up, but it’s been a year now.’

‘What do you do?’ asked George, taking a gulp of wine. It was good.

‘I’m a failed actress.’

George wasn’t sure what to say to this, so he took another gulp of wine, hoping Susan wouldn’t ask him about his job.

‘I almost made it several times,’ continued Susan – George needn’t have worried. ‘But something always went wrong. I almost got a part in Four

Weddings and a Funeral, but my agent fell out with the casting director. I was screen-tested for Moulin Rouge – the musical version with Nichole and Ewan – but I was too old, apparently. Too old to play a hooker.’

‘I used to be in publishing,’ blurted George, ‘We published a biography of Nicole Kidman,’

‘Really?’ Susan looked surprised.

‘I didn’t meet her or anything, but I spoke to her agent a couple of times. He was nice.’

‘Sorry,’ said Susan, and she seemed to soften – to physically seem less angular.

‘What for?’ asked George, goblet of wine held to his mouth.

‘I’m talking about myself. It’s not because I’m hideously self-centred. I just get nervous when I meet new people and feel I’ve got to impress them. I had a date once, years ago, and I ended up doing a performance of Cabaret for him before we’d even left for the restaurant – not just the song, the entire musical. I’d had a few to drink before he arrived to collect me.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said George. ‘I understand. I always feel I have to justify why I’m single, in a crap job and living in a one-bedroom flat at the age of forty.’

‘Why are you?’ asked Susan.

George laughed. It was an alien sound.

‘It’s a long story.'

‘I’m not rushing off anywhere,’ said Susan. ‘.As long as you let me bore you about my audition for Coronation Street.’

‘When you were a kid,’ said George. ‘Did you

read The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe?’

‘I was up for the part of Liz MacDonald ,’ said

Susan. ‘But they said I was too young .’

.

When George woke the following morning his head hurt and felt heavy, but the miserable, fat cat had lost weight. George had forgotten to pull the blind across the window before falling unconscious and late morning autumn light warmed the room. He could hear Susan clunking around her kitchen below, no doubt unaware of her long, seamless rant about stunted creativity - children and lover draining the colour from her life.

George drank two strong black coffees before creeping through the door to his flat and down the communal stairs. He didn’t want to risk Susan encroaching on his day, tainting it with her bitterness.

He pulled open the main front door and light glared at him from the damp pavement. He took a deep breath of cold air and the cat shrank a little more. He paused for a moment before stepping outside.

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