Free The Paperchase by Marcel Theroux

about Stevo’s friends. We both agreed that the guy in silver trousers was an arse and I began to wish I’d made an effort to get to know her before my leaving party.
    ‘So how are you settling in?’ I said.
    ‘Settling in?’
    ‘To your flat.’
    ‘Oh right.’ A smile replaced her puzzled frown. ‘I’ve been living there for two years, Damien.’
    ‘Wow, two years. Time flies when you’re doing night shifts. It doesn’t seem so long since Mary was down there heating up soup on her Baby Belling.’
    Stevo came into the room to find more alcohol. He was drunk and his contact lenses must have been irritating hiseyes because they looked big and wet like a spaniel’s. Tina and I both looked at him.
    ‘Her Baby Belling?’ she said.
    ‘It was like a fifties time warp down there. Distempered walls. No central heating. She came over from Estonia during the war. It was funny actually. She used to leave jars on the stairs outside her door for me to open. She had arthritis, so she couldn’t get the tops off. It was sauerkraut jars, Pepto Bismol or toilet bleach. Do you think that tells some kind of story about her digestive system?’
    She laughed. You know you’re getting closer to an English person when you share a joke about bowels or toilets.
    Buoyed up by her engaging laughter I went on: ‘Her husband was Polish. He was a barber, she told me. Get this, though: she said his business had been ruined by Beatlemania. Because no one wanted to get their hair cut!’
    ‘The estate agent said she went to an old people’s home,’ said Tina.
    ‘Oh no – she died in the flat. In fact, Stevo was with me when they broke down the door.’
    ‘Oh dear. I think I would rather not have known that.’
    The room suddenly seemed so quiet, I thought I could hear church clocks ticking over graveyards across south London. I was trying to resurrect our conversation when Tina said: ‘Your brother is Vivian March, isn’t he? I’m a big fan of his films.’
    I was smiling politely and nodding and about to move on to something else, but from behind us Stevo’s voice said, slowly and clearly: ‘Oops.’ And then. ‘I didn’t say anything.’
    ‘Why oops ?’said Tina, blushing. ‘Do you not get along?’
    ‘We had kind of a falling-out,’ I said. ‘It was a shame because we used to be close.’
    ‘I didn’t know you did such a good reasonable ,’said Stevo to me pointedly. Tina looked very uncomfortable.
    Stevo had a tendency of springing surprises like this: he would call attention to some private matter when you were with someone you barely knew, forcing you either to takethem into your confidence, or leave them feeling paranoid and excluded.
    ‘Stevo’s exaggerating,’ I said. ‘It’s really no big deal.’
    Stevo loitered around the kitchen until Tina said she’d better go. She shook my hand, thanked me for the party and left.
    ‘Thanks for that, Stevo,’ I said. ‘We were getting on nicely until you arrived.’
    ‘You mean, until you told her that the flat was built on the site of an Indian burial ground.’ Stevo flashed me a smile of grey, wine-stained teeth.
    People who didn’t know Stevo thought he was tricky and self-seeking. I’m not sure. I would have thought that someone really tricky and self-seeking would appear to be a self-sacrificing ingénu. Stevo certainly seemed tricky, but maybe it was a protective display like the yellow and black stripes on a stingless insect. I don’t know. In those days, I suppose I was like Patrick, who believed that everyone was tricky and self-seeking. When I got to Ionia, I found a letter in his basement in which he’d written: ‘Human beings have evolved to be assholes. Homo simpaticus is lying at the bottom of Olduvai Gorge with a flint handaxe in his rib cage.’
    ‘Have a toke of this,’ said Stevo, waving a conciliatory spliff in my face.
    I hate pot, spliff, grass, whatever you call it. I could hardly wait to start smoking it when I was at school. Stevo