Vanilla Bright Like Eminem

The Safehouse I I wake up, blinking hard against the sky, and the first thing I remember is that my wife cannot forgive me. Never, ever. Then I remind myself I don't have a wife anymore. Instead, I'm lying at the bottom of a stairwell, thirty concrete steps below street level in a city far from my home. My home is in the past, and I must live in the present. I'm lying on a soft pile of rubbish bags, and I seem to have got myself covered in muck. It's all over my shabby green raincoat and the frayed sleeves of my jumper, and there's a bit on my trousers as well. I sniff it, trying to decide what it is, but I can't be sure. How strange I didn't notice it when I was checking this place out last night. OK, it was already dark by then and I was desperate to find somewhere to doss down after being moved on twice already. But I remember crawling into the rubbish really carefully, prodding the bin bags with my hands and thinking this was the softest and driest bed I was likely to find. Maybe the muck seeped out later on, under pressure from my sleeping body. I look around for something to wipe my clothes with. There's nothing, really. If I were a cat, I'd lick the crap off with my tongue, and still be a proud, even fussy creature. But I'm not a cat. I'm a human being. So, I pull a crumpled-up advertising brochure out of the trash, wet it with dregs from a beer bottle, and start to scrub my jacket vigorously with the damp wad of paper. Maybe it's the exercise, or maybe the rising sun, but pretty soon I feel I can probably get by without these dirty clothesat least until tonight. And tonight is too far away to think about. I stand up, leaving my raincoat and jumper lying in the garbage, where they look as if they belong anyway. I'm left with a big white T-shirt on, my wrinkled neck and skinny arms bare, which feels just right for the temperature. The T-shirt's got writing on the front, but I've forgotten what the writing says. In fact, I can't remember where I got this T-shirt, whether someone gave it to me or I stole it or even bought it, long long ago. I climb the stone steps back up to the street, and start walking along the footpath in no particular direction, just trying to become part of the picture generally. The big picture. Sometimes in magazines you see a photograph of a street full of people, an aerial view. Everyone looks as though they belong, even the blurry ones. I figure it must be quite early, because although there's lots of traffic on the road, there's hardly any pedestrians. Some of the shops haven't opened yet, unless it's a Sunday and they aren't supposed to. So there's my first task: working out what day it is. It's good to have something to get on with. Pretty soon, though, I lose my concentration on this little mission. There's something wrong with the world today, something that puts me on edge.Faber, Michel is the author of 'Vanilla Bright Like Eminem ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780151013142 and ISBN 0151013144.