A little pen portrait I wrote a while back

There’s an artist who comes door to door and breathes whisky fumes at you. Every time I open the door to find him there I get a shock of annoyance and wish I’d used the peep-hole. He gets maudlin when he sees my children behind my legs. He leans down and exhales over them and tells them that he’s lost his kids. He seems to think I’ll be surprised. Even now when he’s been on my doorstep half a dozen times and told us the same thing.

I feel sorry for him with his rheumy eyes and his threadbare clothes but not for long, because then he starts to annoy me with his whining and his self-pity. You’d think he was the only man in the world to have lost his job. And wife. And kids.

He says that his street is the worst in the world for drug-dealers. Or rather it was, because he’s been moved now. He says it’s better now but there are still drug deals going down. Well, of course there are. There’s a dealer down every street in the land. And everyone’s always stunned by the revelation of criminal goings-on in their leafy avenues and nice neighbourhoods. My parents had a coke dealer operating out of the house on the corner of their Georgian cul-de-sac. There was a dealer on our last street who’d get his methadone at the chemist while I was picking up nappies. There’s probably one in the street we live in now, nestling among the students and the therapists and the social workers and the teachers.

The artist carries his wares in a plastic bag. Not a solid carrier from a high street shop, but one of those paper-like supermarket jobs which rustle when they fold and cut into your hand. He does beautiful architectural drawings, complex, technical. Not my taste, but admirable. I’m always astonished by them, and have a sneaking suspicion that he doesn’t do them himself. No one could drink the amount his breath tells me he does and draw straight lines. He says he used to be an architect before things went wrong for him. I always wonder if it was the drink first, or the marital breakdown, or the job loss, or whether they came thick and fast, a tidal wave of sorrows that engulfed him. So now he’s living in a council flat in a drugs-infested street and telling his woes on the doorsteps of strangers who will say anything to get rid of him.

Once when I’d protested several times, but pleasantly, that I didn’t have any money and therefore couldn’t buy one of his drawings, he pressed one into my hand.

“Take it anyway,” he said, “No bugger seems to want to buy any today.”

And he pinched my tiny girl’s cheek half-heartedly, as she stared back at him with blank curiosity.

It was a drawing on a post-card of St Philip’s and St James’, down in the centre of town, a run-down old Victorian church set amidst the concrete and glass of the shiny newly rebuilt shopping centre. It serves during the day as a drop-in centre for the city’s waifs and strays, a place where they can tip their contraband liquor into plastic cups of weak coffee and exchange misery.

I didn’t want it, but I couldn’t give it back. It sat on the hallway shelf for ages and has now made it into a drawer somewhere. I feel bad about it, because I really didn’t want it and I should have told him that, rather than saying that I had no cash. Now when the doorbell rings, if I remember, I use the peephole. I don’t know why, because I still open the door because I know he can hear me and I don’t want him to think badly of me. I think I’m probably nicer to him than most people because he relaxes when he sees me, leaning on the door jamb in a way that makes me search in my mind for excuses to get away; “there’s something on the stove”, “the baby needs changing”, “I’m terribly sorry but I’m really desperate for the loo”; that sort of thing.

“Hello, it’s me again,” he says, and I smile wanly, “I’m here with more of these drawings,” and he holds them up resignedly, knowing that no bugger wants them.