Spurious by Lars Iyer

damp proofing companies in turn, I tell him, one after another. The water’s getting in behind the rendering, said one. You’ll have to strip it off, repoint the brick, and render it again. It’s the holes in your wall, said another, referring to the long scar left where the lead pipe had to be pulled away.
    It’s your hopper, said yet another, showing me a thick patch of green on the top of the pipe through which it drained. Ah yes, I said, I tell W., impressed at his observational powers. Do nothing, said another; let the wall breathe. But I need to breathe!, I tell W. I need to take a single non-damp breath! I’ve got spores in my lungs! They’re coated in mildew!
    A fifth pressed his nose to the brown plaster in the bathroom. He put his hand on its wet surface. He sniffed. It’s condensation that’s causing it, he said. Condensation, I said, behind all this? The flat all around us, brown-walled with damp. People underestimate condensation, said the damp whisperer. In a flat like this, with the double-glazing, there’s nowhere for water to escape.
    He told me about the dew point, I tell W. He told me how the wall comes forward to offer itself to the touch of condensation. I imagined a runner breasting the finish line, I tell W. I imagined a swordfish leaping from the sea.
    But the sixth interpreter said he thought it was penetrating damp, the sort that permeates through pasty brick and the gaps between bricks. Penetrating, coming through, a brown, persistent wave …
    Damp calls for a Talmudic inquiry; I go from one wise man to another, from one to another, but none is really certain of the Law.

 
    One of us is dragging the other down, W. and I decide, but which one? Is it him or me? His friends say that since he’s been hanging out with me, his work’s really gone downhill. People are avoiding us, says W. They can smell failure.
    I’m going to be found out, that’s what I worry about, says W. Someone’s going to find out about me and shoot me, W. says, it’s only right. ‘How have I survived this long?’ , W. says, ‘that’s your only thought. By what miracle have I survived?’
    W. has thought up many excuses for me. He’s had to account for me at length to his friends. Explain him!, they demand. What’s going on? And W. has to explain, as best he can, how it all started, how our collaboration began.
    But what can he say, really? There’s a limit to every explanation, which is to say the sheer physical fact of my existence.—‘There you are’, says W. And before that fact, what can anyone do but shrug?

 
    ‘Thought should bear upon what matters most’, says W. as we look out to sea. ‘What matters most to you?’, asks W. ‘Your dinner? Alcohol? Chav mags?’
    What matters most, W. muses, are the coming End Times. The ecological disaster and the financial disaster.—‘They’re nearly upon us’, he says. ‘Are you ready for the End Times?’ Is he? Least of all him, W. says. Least of all us.
    We’ll be the first to go under, W. says. The very first. He’ll welcome it, says W., as judgement for our miserable lives and the immensity of our failure.
    ‘You’re never witty’, says W., ‘that’s a sign of intelligence: wit’. W. says he is sometimes witty, but, more generally, he’s never witty. I never bring it out in him, W. says. I don’t make him more intelligent.
    W. is more intelligent than me, he decides. But what about those illuminated moments when the clouds part, and I have ideas? It’s true, I do have moments of illumination, W. grants, but they are sporadic and lead nowhere.
    Sometimes, W. concedes, it’s as if I have ideas. I once spoke to him very movingly about the Phaedrus , for example, and the reason why Socrates had to leave the city to talk to his friend.
    W. immediately lays claim in his essays to any idea I might have. I would do the same, he says. But of course, my ideas are always wrong. They’re full of pathos, he says, and they sound correct, but in