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Why, with all this choice, all this competition, was it me he chose to torment?
    Why too had I chosen Camden Town? Scene of a million teenage rebellions, where the anticonformist slogans are printed on sweatshop T-shirts, where punks eat in fast-food chains and the Rastas have only mixed herbs in their pockets. All these bold statements diluted. The iconoclasts posing for pictures. A muted, contrary, theme-park place. Yes, Camden Town was next to the zoo with good reason. It was a parade of denied impulses, of things reduced to type, of lions that could not remember how to hunt. It upset me to see it. Yet here I was at the center of it. What was I denying? What petty rebellion was I staging?
    But I was not familiar with London and its neighborhoods when I arrived, a competent degree from a mid-table university to my name, a great career as a writer no doubt just around the corner. Camden Town was the only place I could remember. This was my excuse. I recalled a place of cheap food and sanitized vice, a place whose risks were minimal despite its claims to the contrary. The side of Camden away from the market, however, the side where Mrs. Molina’s lodgings stood, was different. Its sleaze was real. Faces of young girls loomed out of doorways at me, calling to me sadly as I scurried past. No time, I would tell them, proud of how polite, how charming, I had been. No time for gratification, my dear. Not all of us are burdened by such needs. Some of us have loftier concerns, like the book I would soon begin to write. Besides, I had no money.
    â€”
    Money, or the lack of it, was how I ended up at The Swan. For a while there is a pleasure in economy—stealing toilet paper and ketchup packets from pubs, traveling the city on foot, obsessively tracking down the cheapest portion of chips, the most basic cup of coffee—but it soon becomes miserable trying to resist every tickling urge. By evening you are exhausted. You lie on your bed like a man with smallpox, aware of all the spots of want and desire about your body, listening to the cries of the city outside your window as other people realize those desires, unable to move because the slightest motion will inflame those itches a hundred times over. . . . It is a horrible condition. Not a pure form of poverty, but certainly its suburbs. Otherwise I believe I might have frittered away the rest of my existence in that overstuffed armchair. Given time the human creature can get used to just about anything, and my natural laziness had allowed me to adapt quickly. Even the
pentelho
and threatsof
polícia
and
pussyclot
had started to take on a reassuring familiarity. But I needed money, needed it to avoid going home, so I put on my secondhand overcoat and went looking for a job.
    What would I do? I was not against work. That was not my position at all. I considered work a very fine and noble endeavor. I just didn’t want to do it myself. And under no circumstances would I do a McJob, because that’s where he always said I’d end up. I toyed briefly with the idea of being a street cleaner. They earned good money, apparently. I could sweep the city and watch the people and let my mind wander. But a council gig would take an age to process: my scant savings were already gone and the hock money for my hi-fi was running out quicker than I had expected. Moreover, I could hear his mocking voice as my mother relayed the news that his youngest was sweeping the streets.
A cleaner? In a pinny or mopping turds?
I did not care too much for hospitality either. My poor brother had taken the sociable genes. But I reckoned, up against it, that I could stomach a few months behind a bar.
    So I papered the public houses of Camden with my brief but thoughtful CV (three weeks as a script prompt for a university production of
Julius Caesar
; hobbies include walking and “being in nature”), and I waited. The Swan was the only place to reply, which made me immediately