Neighbours Of Zero: The Body In The Mobile Library By Peter Bradshaw

The stylistic simplicity of Guardian film critic and novelist Peter Bradshaw’s short stories is a blind. The opening tale of this studiedly unassuming collection is a marvel of restraint, whose initial suggestion of postwar sexual innocence, reminiscent of McEwan’s On Chesil Beach, rapidly unfolds, firstly into manipulation - a Polish former airman’s fumbling desperation is turned against him by the practiced advances of a prostitute – and secondly by accident, as Tadeusz falls down the stairs to his death on his way to retrieving a hidden contraceptive. If the denouement is unexpected, then its conclusion – a detailed description of his body’s gathering necrosis – entirely confounds expectation. Pathologically rendered, the process of decrepitude reduces Tadeusz to cosmic dust and the sense of obliteration is complete, the single token of existence, a breath of wind blown through a window several decades later.

The conceit sustains throughout Bradshaw’s collection: a deceptively simple approach is transfigured into irony by the omnipresence of negotiated histories, misunderstandings and misplaced memories, hinting at psychological experiences to which the reader can only be made privy by suggestion. ‘Reunion’, for example, achieves a satisfyingly Barnes-esque conclusion by renegotiating the terms of engagement with an unexpected recapitulation, a kiss, whose significance rewards an ill-meant childhood promise.

Or the sense of gathering anomic desperation, forensically examined in the title story. Bradshaw is adept at interrogating a depressing zeitgeist whilst rounding off a story with no assimilable ending, as though to corroborate the continuing untidiness of our lives. That the story’s protagonist DI Alex Greer lives in a block of flats in Watford with a ‘fine view of the hospital and football ground’ is a triumph of morbid understatement whose tone dovetails almost perfectly with the image of a hanged man with a large penis found dead of auto-erotic asphyxiation in the living book of a mobile library. Bradshaw masterfully reworks the nether end of lived experience to create tableaux of wonk, disorder and déshabillé: all life disports in the rat-runs of urbania. The sense of ennui with which the, now reflective, Greer is infected, is not likely to be mediated elsewhere in this grimly earnest collection, and in ‘Neighbours of Zero’, a first-person directed story of gambling excess, the narrator’s nihilistic actuation makes of him a metaphor for the grubby and corrosive culture by which he is enclosed, a John Self of the picaresque purlieus of East London. Finding a loophole in the betting system, the protagonist’s uncircumscribed sense of purpose is invested with immense wit in Bradshaw’s reading:

"I had created a vortex in the money continuum. It was like typing ‘Google’ into Google. It created a karmic black hole. The universe was haemorrhaging money through the conceptual anus of existence into my bank account."

A social observer by instinct, Bradshaw picks out the detail behind the closed doors of dolls houses, and if an open-eyed gaze into the angry, the desperate and the alienated leaves a sense of abandonment in its wake, then another form of erosion – the inexorable mental degradation of dementia – is traded for gathering coherence in ‘Senior Moment’. A beautifully realised story of unfolding awareness, the central figure discovers himself in a toilet in a country house hotel, unable to recall his full name. As other figures pass in corridors, seemingly gathered for an event, the reader follows Ivor Frederick Jones through the hotel and around the grounds, in the annals of his own reduced mind, as he dissembles his way to a kind of resolution. In an affecting study of mental decline, Bradshaw’s steadying tone is neither moribund nor hopeless: as Ivor mistakes his dead wife for his daughter, the discovery of his middle name is a small synaptic triumph amongst the cognitive weeds. And it is utterly convincing.

The witty and cleverly-researched story of the appearance, out of the aether, of a manuscript copy written in Wordsworth’s hand of a racy ‘three-way’ sexual encounter that was to become a part of Prelude is the basis for a witty first-person piss-take on the nature of academic rigour and the uncertainty of literary provenance. Julian Smattering, Ph.D student, Wordsworth-obsessive and F-grade drag is a useful idiot, whose ‘smattering’ of knowledge of the Romantics leads him to the centre of a criminal ring bent on flogging the manuscript to a rich American buyer. Gorgeously upholstered, Bradshaw’s writing is always on-point. And if an element of surreality underpins several of the stories here, one is obliged to marvel at the writer’s skill in translating unlikely, or unprepossessing, themes into serviceable vignettes through the medium of satire; not least when they involve an ex-pontiff with a secret penchant for screenwriting, or the idea of redemption vouchsafed in the miraculous disappearance of an unsightly ‘monobrow’ (‘Holiness’):

"Nothing less than a Christmas miracle. I could feel tiny hairs fall from above the bridge of my nose and they showered like cherry blossom in a sudden breeze. A mass of little black flecks, like a murmuration of starlings falling through the air."

Bradshaw’s easy familiarity with the venal accoutrements of the social fabric is cleverly adjusted to subordinate the rich and the notable to narrative purpose. In a neat reversal of what has become an irritatingly common digital phenomenon, a genuine Benin heiress, whose father has committed suicide leaving a huge fortune in his wake, seeks to repatriate the loot in an anonymous British bank account. But the arrangement, reminiscent of so many fraudulent requests prosecuted randomly by email, is sincerely intended, and finds safe harbour with one recipient. Bradshaw’s pay-off is exquisite: in the interests of diligent fund management, the recipient invests the cash in Bernard L. Madoff Investments. More intriguing still in a book of counter-intuition and surprise, is the reappearance of John Smith – the beneficiary – in a later story, now beached in an empty London flat, inevitably skint and desperate, left to wonder, in the company of a grocery delivery driver, what happened to ‘all the wonderful things’ (‘This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things’).

Sideswipes at Bernie Madoff give the story an effortless currency. Insinuated into the landscape of all he surveys, Bradshaw’s day job must weight his critical skills with a cynical edge. If the morally corrective conclusion to ‘Looking Glass’ redeems the heartless cynicism of ‘fly-on-the-wall’ TV, then the cruel misogyny of the protagonist of ‘Ghosting’ is met with terrifyingly fitting, and overwhelmingly karmic, justice in the subterfuge of his own bed.

But Bradshaw’s eye for contemporary detail rarely misses a beat, and if a penchant for inconclusive endings is a métier, then it hints at a wider cultural uncertainty. Making few concessions to reader satisfaction, the storyteller is more likely to blindside expectation with the promulgation of quotidian truths. He leaves us hanging in the air, with no appreciable compromise to narrative integrity in a world given to mayhap and volte face,

Excepting, perhaps, for the final story of sleight-of-hand, manipulation and loneliness, set in a café in Piccadilly whose resemblance to any one of a hundred others is artfully conceived, and as practiced at propagating a cultural façade of artificial décor and endless Danish pastries as the burgeoning pretence of human attraction. Measuring the fraught and introspective stages of love-interest by the stamps on a loyalty card, the unfortunate Kevin receives his illusory ‘reward’ by Stamp 9. But it is to Peter Bradshaw’s immense skill at extruding desperation through the die of sardonic wit that we keep returning:

"She was chatting to him out of pure pity. It was a pity chat. The sort you might have with an elderly relative at the beginning of a family party. But even if it was a pity chat, it could easily morph into pity sex. Or rather respect sex. It could well be an example of that very well-known thing whereby extremely attractive people have respect sex with people that they respect. It was a version of the respect sex that he had with himself many times, especially recently, after drinking half a bottle of red wine: sessions of solo respect sex which concluded with solemn tears shed in earnest tribute to the courage with which he withstood the awful pain of his loneliness." (Loyalty’)


The Body in the Mobile Library & Other Stories is published by Lightning Books.

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