The Who Bloke

 

There were two doors, both number fourteen. One of them was A and the other was B respectively referring to upstairs and ground floor flats, but it was anyone's guess which was which. Both doors had inset panels of frosted glass so if you pressed your nose up close, you could just about see a flight of stairs behind the door on the right; but without any indication or which was A and which was B, it was anyone's guess. I tended to put the mail for flat A in the door on the right, basing this decision on a hierarchy of the uppermost dwelling being the primary one. Occasionally one of them would get something specifically addressed to the basement flat. After a while I began to remember the names, as I did with almost everyone on Glengarry Road after a year or so, and it got to the point where I no longer even needed an accurate house number. If, for example, I had something addressed to someone with the surname of Burnap supposedly living at number 63, it would go to number 36 without my really having to think about it, because that was where Campbell Burnap lived. Somehow I still retain some of this information twenty years later.

I haven't retained the name of the guy who lived at 14A, or possibly 14B but it may have been Adrian, or at least he looked like an Adrian to me. He resembled a more sensitive version of Phil Mitchell from Eastenders and was obviously gay. I'd been living and working in East Dulwich for about five years and gay people seemed drawn to the area for no obvious reason beyond that it was quiet and mostly civilised, and so I had somehow developed gaydar without really trying. I don't know how I knew, but I almost always did, although the information was never really much use to me. My sexual liasons have historically tended to favour persons with boobs, and jokes with opening lines such as three poufs walk into a bar aren't entirely my thing so I've never needed to check whether the coast was clear before committing myself to knuckleheaded discourse.

That said, at the time I hadn't had sexual liaisons with anyone in possession of boobs for a number of years and, some might argue as a consequence, I had taken to Doctor Who books. There was a new one  every month, and most of them were better than anything which had been on the telly. Doctor Who had been cancelled in 1989 and was still a decade away from returning as Britain's favourite breakfast cereal, so people tended to look at you funny when you mentioned it. I'd been obsessed with the show as a child and then as a teenager, so this may even have been the early onset of a peculiarly specific form of mid-life crisis.

One item of mail regularly received by Adrian - or whatever his name could have been - was a monthly subscription copy of Doctor Who magazine. I'd looked at the thing in WHSmith a couple of times but it was a bit too intensive even for me. Nevertheless, it meant I was well-disposed towards the Who bloke at 14A, or possibly 14B, even before I met him. On the first few occasions when I actually did meet him, my cheery postal good morning was met with only a silent sullen glance, but I persisted on the assumption that he was probably just having a bad day, plus life is too short to harbour resentment against persons you don't actually know. Eventually I caught him at his front door as I stood there with his latest issue of Doctor Who magazine about to go in the letterbox.

'Yes, I've been meaning to have a word with you,' he began somewhat icily, then went into a lengthy complaint about his mail being delivered to the flat upstairs.

'I understand the problem,' I said, 'but I don't think it's me,' launching into an explanation which probably foreshadowed the first paragraph, adding that his complaint tended to be common when I was on holiday and someone else was covering for me, and that whoever that was stood only a 50% chance of getting it right given the absence of anything to indicate which flat was which.

He seemed to understand, and was even a bit embarrassed, so I changed the subject with, I see you're into Doctor Who, which was probably akin to recognising a fellow Freemason in whichever year it was. He smiled for what seemed to be the first time ever, and we compared notes for a minute before he had to be off, being on his way out somewhere.

The next occasion, I got invited in, which was a bit of a shock after the first couple of frosty years and his failure to reciprocate any of my greetings. He was a little older than me but looked significantly older, so I thought, and his flat was much the same as mine. He mentioned a partner of unspecified gender, possibly feeling awkward about it for some reason, and that the partner had died. Additionally, his mother had died more recently. This seemed to explain my impression of him being a less than happy bunny, and I mentioned the unreciprocated greetings, or at least tactfully referred to them by saying, 'yes, you always struck me as having a lot on your mind.'

'Sorry about that,' he said. 'I think I was having a bit of a nervous breakdown for a while there.'

We talked about Who, albeit at crossed purposes. He hadn't read the books, although he'd heard good things about them; and he was quite into conventions and fan gatherings, which didn't really sound like my sort of thing. He'd met Sophie Aldred a couple of times and told me that her screen persona was pretty much her persona in real life. He showed me a fairly large model TARDIS which occupied his bedside table and had a lamp inside, which I found a bit weird. I might have found it weird that he showed me his bedroom, but his flat seemed to be mainly just a bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen - much like my own. We seemed to be fairly similar in many respects.

I imagined that this would be the start of a friendship, if not necessarily a beautiful friendship, but from then on he kept himself pretty much to himself, just as before. Our meetings were chance occurrences, albeit significantly more jovial chance occurrences than they had once been. The very last time I saw him, he'd been having a clear out and getting rid of stuff. I handed him his mail and he gave me a DVD, saying, 'Here, you need to see this if you haven't already.'

It was a DVD of the BBC's Edge of Darkness from 1985. I'd never heard of it.

'Then you really need to watch it,' he said. 'It's very good.'

It seemed to be a crime drama and therefore possibly not my sort of thing, but it seemed like a generous act so I took the DVD home and watched it. I moved away from home in 1984 and didn't have a television again until about 1993, which is why I'd never heard of Edge of Darkness. The irony is that I'd moved away from home to take a fine art degree specialising in time based media, specifically film, video and, I suppose, television.

I thought Edge of Darkness was amazing, and so much so that I insisted my friend Andy come over and watch it too, which he did over a couple of afternoons. He also thought it was wonderful, and particularly enjoyed Joe Don Baker's massively entertaining portrayal of a Texan character named Darius Jedburgh - this in spite of Andy's infrequently stated general dislike of American culture.

'Yes,' he grudgingly conceded after we'd just watched Jedburgh terrorise guests at a conference with lumps of plutonium, 'if one really must be an American, then you should at least have the decency to be from Texas.'

I have no idea what became of Adrian, but Who was back on the box by 2005, and was a huge hit but seemed to have lost whatever it was I'd liked about the thing in the first place. Given that I now live in Texas, the rest may add up to some kind of narrative - if not necessarily one which means anything profound - but you may have to put the pieces together yourself.