Gents. Warwick Collins

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       CHAPTER 2

      Jason removed a key from his pocket and opened a locker-room door. He handed Ez a green overall.

      “Fit you?”

      Ez slipped it over his shoulders.

      “Seem OK.”

      Jason reached into the cupboard and brought out an extra mop.

      “This for you.”

      Ez gripped the wooden shaft of the mop. Jason hauled out a big tin bucket with a heavy handle. He handed it to Ez. Jason pointed to a single tap on the wall with a thick enamel basin beneath.

      “Main tap there.”

      Jason indicated some buckets lined neatly against the farther wall of the locker room. Several held plastic containers of green fluid.

      “Cleaning. Three teaspoon for a bucket.”

      “OK.”

      Jason indicated a row of boxes containing cakes of antiseptic deodorant for the latrines.

      “Replacement.”

      Ez nodded.

      “You OK? You got everything?”

      Ez smiled. “In the Kingdom.”

      Ez walked away to the tap, filled the bucket, poured in some cleaning fluid, dipped the mop. He started to work, swinging the mop over the tiled floors.

      Jason smiled briefly, put in his earphones, and took up his own mop.

      For perhaps half an hour Ez washed the floors with Jason working in the background. He could hear only the faint scratching of Jason’s music.

      He swung the head of the mop in long sweeps, quartering an area towards the door and Reynolds’ office. When he had finished he took a long-handled sponge and began to work back over the wet floors.

      There was an uneven flow of customers down the steps, through the rattling turnstiles, to the urinals. He became used to the definitions of space, the silences of the tiles, the occasional footsteps of men as they approached the urinals, paused, then walked back through the turnstiles. After a while the flow of men to and fro from the urinals began to remind him of water in its restless inconstancy.

      Ez worked slowly towards the cubicles. They were set out against the farthest wall from the entrance, a line of seventeen in all, with wooden doors and solid mahogany frames. He reached the end of the room, then he turned parallel to the line of cubicles and began to work his way to the adjacent wall.

      Behind him, the occasional customer entered a cubicle and bolted the latch. He heard the slam of a door as someone exited from a cubicle and then the sound of metal bearings as he passed through the turnstile.

      Later that morning, towards lunch, he stopped, blinked, stretched. A man emerged from a nearby cubicle. Ez gained an impression of a City suit, of early middle age, of the brief shine of baldness beneath thinning hair. The man passed through the turnstiles and began to walk up the stairs beyond. He seemed to drift upwards, as though in a trance, towards the grey light of the exit.

      Ez put down the mop and walked over to the cubicle.

      He opened the door to visit the cubicle himself. But before he could enter, a second man came out, brushing past him, not catching his eye.

      In his initial incomprehension it seemed to Ez curiously like a magical trick – two rabbits from the same hat. Or perhaps déjà vu. He tried to assemble an impression of the second man, of a white face with fair hair and almost albino eyelids, of a grey City suit like the first, and an air of calmness or preoccupation. He was younger and fairer than the first man, though they might have come from the same firm, the same office. Ez watched him walk through the turnstiles and up the steps. He listened to the final faint patter of his leather-soled shoes as he disappeared from view into clouded daylight.

      He glanced at Jason, who was standing a few yards away, leaning on his mop, watching Ez equivocally. Jason smiled, shook his head, and turned away. He began to mop the floor again. Ez heard the furred music from his headphones, like an insect fluttering against a pane.