Removal

          You couldn’t put anything valuable as such in these lockers. The latch was easily lifted with a butter knife, no problem. Skinner took out his boots. He was unable to walk all the way home in his shoes and he couldn’t stand all night at work in the boots. He had to change them.

          He raised the left foot with some care, it was the left one that was the issue, and it was both a pleasure and a pain to have it in the open air again. He transferred the two foam insoles from his shoe to his boot, just the left one again, anxious not to tear them because they had seen some hard wear and he quickly got the boot on. He was afraid the foot would swell if it had the chance. It was that pad immediately behind the toes on the sole of the foot that gave him gyp. Sometimes it turned as hard as iron, he didn’t know why, and then it was like walking home with a couple of ball-bearings in his boot.

          He could see one or two of the lads looking sidelong at him and smiling, with their awful confidence, at what an old crank he had become, while they slipped a comb through their hair and scrolled their mobile phones.

          He didn’t walk home the exact same way every time. There was not a lot of difference in the routes but it was deadening to not have some small change. He had seen a hearse the other day and thought he’d avoid that street and not walk past a house in mourning. He wondered how much longer his own next-door neighbour would last. He had seen him stretchered out to an ambulance six months earlier, his head looking suddenly smaller and without his teeth, which he rarely ever wore now that he never went out anyway, and Skinner thought, looking out of his window,

- I shall not see you again.

          But ten days later, after his operation, he was back and he looked okay, relatively speaking. It

was Skinner’s own mother who had died in the meantime. He sometimes worried about who

would move in next door when old George was gone.

          Down this street he would see that car up on bricks after the kids, most likely, had had the tyres away. It was still there. Of course it was. The passenger window was taped up with a bin liner now, so someone was taking care of it, just as someone else was taking it apart. A motorbike clattered past him like a machine-gun.

          The street was full of black bin bags waiting for collection. Good luck with that. There was a new window boarded up and a chipboard door closed with a padlock and a Police Aware sticker on it. That had already been altered to Police Beware.

          There was a lot of graffiti; on pillar boxes, the warehouse wall, the hoardings where advertisements used to be pasted up, sometimes still were. Skinner couldn’t interpret any of it. It was not for him. The advertisements were as opaque as the graffiti to tell the truth. He didn’t know what they were selling. He didn’t want it. Couldn’t afford it. There were troops of jackdaws on all of the roofs. What was the collective noun for jackdaws? A mockery. It was beginning to rain.

          He skirted past the new shopping mall without even looking in its direction. He remembered that opening and had known it would founder and fail and it had. There was some sort of abstract municipal sculpture in front of it that looked like a tank trap but surely it couldn’t be.

          He turned into a street where a group of young men were standing around a brazier. They were cooking something that didn’t smell so good to Skinner. People were starting to live outside for much of the day now as though this were the Mediterranean. The men were self-conscious like bad actors maybe acting out a scenario for a museum. They made the world look old-fashioned. Skinner crossed the road to avoid them. They had an opened suitcase by the brazier full of damp clothes which they might have been using for fuel. They looked ill-fed and unhealthy. One of them had a dirty bandage wrapped around his hand.

          Skinner lived at the other end of his street so he had a long time to wonder about the people gathered near his house. There was a large grey van parked outside George’s gate which he thought might be another ambulance and at the same time knew it wasn’t.

          The crowd was rather ragged he could see, as he got nearer, not like people are when a queue breaks down and they swarm towards a small door and not really like schoolboys might surround a fight or the scene of an accident. The people milled. They were not packed. They moved around as things happened or when they saw someone they wanted to talk to. There were not so many people in the crowd, about thirty, but they came and went as they got bored or fetched a friend to come and have a look. They were not around George’s house, they were around Skinner’s. There could not have been a fire.

          The crowd made a little room for Skinner as he arrived. His front door was open and two or three men in grey overalls were walking in and out of his house and apparently transferring his belongings to the van. The van was completely grey except it had Better Trust The Experts painted on both sides of it.

          One of the grey men seemed to be in charge because he did nothing except stand by the back of the van and direct the men doing the actual lifting. He was older than his colleagues and bigger too, overweight really. His hair was very black and he had a thick moustache and his jowls were dark, the sort of man who has to shave twice a day. He had a leaden demeanour, a face of putty and lead.

          Skinner approached this man,

- What’s happening here? This is my house and these are my things.

Just then one of the men coming out of his house lost his grip on the TV set he was rather ambitiously trying to carry by himself and let it crash to the path. The set fell with a clang that was obviously its death knell and the delighted crowd let out an ironic cheer such as is heard in a pub when the barman drops a glass.

- Butterfingers!

          Skinner looked around. He recognised several neighbours but most of these people he had never seen before. George was peering from his window too frightened to come out and he ducked away when he saw that Skinner had noticed him. Skinner gestured half-heartedly towards him as though to say,

- What about him? He’s older than me.

But he didn’t say anything.

          He went and stood in front of the foreman and felt like a little boy confronting a full-grown man. He spoke up,

- These things belong to me, you know. This is my house. These are my belongings.

The foreman looked over Skinner’s head pointing and giving directions and may have said, muttering without interest into his moustache,

- Well, everything belongs to somebody.

The man did say, quite distinctly,

- Put that down on the grass for a bit. We don’t want it yet.

Skinner turned and saw two of the grey men drop his armchair on the grass he liked to call his lawn. An elderly woman immediately sat down on the chair and began trying to unfasten a rolled umbrella. Skinner’s umbrella.

- Hey, he walked over to her, thinking he might make an impression on her, that’s my chair.

- I’m only taking the weight off, she said.

          She started to struggle out of the broken-bottomed chair with its uncertain and unhelpful arms, but a bystander, who was eating nuts and raisins from a paper bag like a man at a fair and who had a ribbon of black crêpe pinned to his lapel, said,

- She’s an old woman.

- It’s my chair, said Skinner, already feeling in the wrong.

- Do you want to sit in it right now? asked a man with a bilious expression and a cloth cap.

- Not right now, no.

- Well then, he said, pleased with himself. Dog in the manger, he added.

There were smiles and nods at this as the old woman continued to struggle to get out of the chair. Skinner was sure no one but he knew what the expression meant. He limped away grumbling to himself.

- This is ridiculous. Dog in the manger indeed.

Everyone was coming together like a family or a freemasonry and only he was left as an outsider.

          He saw his brass coal scuttle being carried out. That had been his mother’s, as innocent of coal now as it had been for all of his childhood. Skinner had never wanted it but had not known how to say no to it. Now here it was leaving so easily as if of its own accord. He watched it do so without regret. Other things that had been his mother’s followed. A small statue of an elephant was admired and also one of a pig that he had bought himself.

          He realised that as he moved around in the crowd, the ingredients of which changed all of the time, people forgot who he was. He shrugged off Skinner, briefly, from time to time, and he was quickly no longer the man who had complained about the woman sitting in the chair.

          He noticed that the foreman often decided that certain items were not worth loading into the van. He gave some of these away to people in the crowd, taking full credit for his generosity, and others he auctioned in an informal way, pocketing small notes and change. Skinner’s capacity for outrage was already compromised. He didn’t want any of these things that were being given away or sold and he didn’t resent the foreman being paid for work done. He hadn’t really thought that anyone was stealing from him. They were simply taking his things somewhere else.

          He knew that if he had ever wanted to move house, such a task would have been beyond him and now it was happening with little fuss or effort on his part. Maybe this enforced removal was okay. It had to happen one day and it might not matter that everything was not happening in the right order.

          Watching his belongings leave him as though animated by some charm was like watching his life unravel. Books, CDs, a radio and a typewriter, photograph albums, magazines and letters. All of the shame and stupidity of it. That expense of spirit. The crowd laughed dutifully at what Skinner had when it was occasionally held up for their derision. Some were disgusted. They made animal noises as these things were passed around and turned over, then leered at him with a horrible intimacy. Fortunately his handwriting was difficult and they soon gave up on that. They were appalled that he had bills going back years as though he had not paid them and they were keen to identify habits too extravagant or too mean.

          Skinner was embarrassed to assert his ownership of some of these items, even though they were perhaps rare and therefore valuable. He joined in with the jeering several times. He shouted out things about himself as though he were one of the crowd.

- It’s alright, he said. He lived alone. He wasn’t married.

This was met with a hoot and a groan that implied some innuendo that Skinner couldn’t fathom. It was like the graffiti. One man whistled with a terrifying penetration and everyone laughed. That could have meant anything.

          He began to wonder if this were not all his fault. Had he left the door open? Was it as simple as that, or was it because he had been ill that he had brought this on himself?

- He’s not been well, he called out and several men booed.

- Arrogance, said a young woman with a lisp, her face pretty but spiteful.

          He realised how hungry he was when he saw that a man was circulating through the crowd carrying a tray of hot snacks. He bought a cheese and tomato pastry from him and gave his change to a legless chap who was wheeling himself about on a board. He had sung a song about the War;

Wherever I may roam

On land or sea or foam

You will always find me

Singing this song,

and then passed his hat around.

          Skinner found himself standing next to a policeman, an extremely tall man even without his helmet, and with a complexion like a pork chop. Skinner wiped the crumbs from his mouth with his sleeve. He would have been pleased to see an officer fifteen minutes earlier but now he felt uneasy. The foreman gave the policeman a mock salute but no one else took any notice of him. Their attention was dissipating. Two or three began to mess about with the broken TV. Twiddling knobs. Scratching at smudges on the screen. Small groups spoke of other things. Men shook hands. Joyless little bullies with barbarous haircuts and heavy eyelids. Skinner was annoyed that they were already losing interest in him.

- Was entry forced? the policeman asked into the air, but it was Skinner who made the

mistake of answering,

- I don’t know. I wasn’t here, defending himself.

The policeman turned to look down on him.

- You’re in trouble, aren’t you? Have you been inside? Are you unemployed?

- Funemployed! shouted a wag.

- ‘Unemployed’, I said.

- No. I have a job.

- Huh, you had a house.

- Had?

- You could be a removal man. That’s a steady job. Plenty of work.

Skinner had a vision of removals taking place all over the town.

- I haven’t the shoulders for it.

The policeman put his head on one side, sizing Skinner up.

- Where are they taking my things?

The policeman glanced at the foreman, who was preoccupied.

- These things may be being taken away for evidence.

- Evidence of what?

- Of how you have lived. They might find anything. You will not want to deny it.

          The policeman, realising that he was not necessarily that popular in this place, nor even welcome, sidled towards the edge of the crowd before anything awkward was asked of him and then he walked purposefully away speeding up as he became more sure of his escape.

- Copper, someone said, a man wearing an obvious wig and a jacket too big for him.

          The crowd was cheering up again and that pleased Skinner. The removal men were still bringing out boxes and crates of miscellaneous objects. Rusty tools; spanners, ratchets and files. And machine parts; cogs, wheels, levers and springs that Skinner did not recognise and which perhaps had come from some outhouse or cellar where he had not been for years, but the house was getting quite empty now. He went to have a look through his front window. It looked better empty. He noted the marks around the light switches and the unfaded rectangles where pictures had hung. The fabric of the house glittered in the rain as though studded with specks of mica. He had stood by this wall when the sun had made it so hot that it burned your hand to touch it. Skinner had never cared for his home properly. His presence there had always felt temporary, which of course, it was. Could he live there now, like it was now?

          There were things in this house that could not be removed, the indelible things. What it had been like to live there, the things that had happened. Skinner was being presented with more choices than he liked and he wasn’t sure if the things he was hearing were being said by people standing behind him or not.

- He wants to be left to his own devices.

- Feeble and inadequate though they are.

- Just because something is true, there is no need to say it out loud.

          He walked back over to the van, which was getting full. His left foot was humming its dreary tune. He asked again,

- Where are you taking my possessions?

The foreman seemed to be prepared to give Skinner more attention. Perhaps they were both tiring.

- Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. One thing at a time. We’ll just get it all in the van. We are at a stage when some ingenuity is called for.

          Skinner didn’t know what to do and he didn’t see why he should know. In the van there was a heap of pillows and sheets and his mattress on its side.

          It was beginning to rain more heavily. Everything lying outside was going to be spoilt. Maybe he should help to load the van, or find his umbrella, but he didn’t really care about what got wet.

          He didn’t care enough about anything. That was the trouble. Get in the van? It might be on its way to the dump. Or he could ask if he could stay with George. In fact, he could insist on that. Or he might walk back and see what was going on by the brazier. Make an enquiry of that man with the dirty bandage wrapped around his hand.