If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things
If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things
Jon McGregor
WINNER OF THE BETTY TRASK AWARDWINNER OF THE SOMERSET MAUGHAM AWARDLONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZEOn a street in a town in the North of England, ordinary people are going through the motions of their everyday existence – street cricket, barbecues, painting windows… A young man is in love with a neighbour who does not even know his name. An old couple make their way up to the nearby bus stop. But then a terrible event shatters the quiet of the early summer evening. That this remarkable and horrific event is only poignant to those who saw it, not even meriting a mention on the local news, means that those who witness it will be altered for ever.Jon McGregor's first novel brilliantly evokes the histories and lives of the people in the street to build up an unforgettable human panorama. Breathtakingly original, humane and moving, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things is an astonishing debut.
If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things
Jon McGregor
Copyright (#ud07d367e-0d14-500c-8c1d-4ed3d2a305a1)
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.4thEstate.co.uk (http://www.4thEstate.co.uk)
First published by Bloomsbury in 2002
This eBook published by 4th Estate in 2017
Copyright © 2002 by Jon McGregor
Cover image © Shutterstock
Jon McGregor asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780008218690
Ebook Edition © January 2017 ISBN: 9780008218706
Version: 2016-12-07
To Alice
Contents
Cover (#u651a90f8-901f-572f-ba50-bdead6fa4b86)
Title Page (#u582e6bcf-c480-50fd-90c3-4570926b5aea)
Copyright
Dedication (#ud724d227-4bdf-52ca-bc98-85c567f774e2)
Chapter 1 (#ulink_11b9762b-3d2c-5dc3-8e4b-ac94374a20be)
Chapter 2 (#ulink_bcffd8a6-5cb3-529c-b35d-b5ae1cb061fb)
Chapter 3 (#ulink_1ba40c7b-16ea-5cea-8f8c-f18ef7621501)
Chapter 4 (#ulink_8d613eb3-f356-591e-b12b-cfbca0845695)
Chapter 5 (#ulink_d468d4d6-f8b7-577f-b94a-351ab5716617)
Chapter 6 (#ulink_00d02ac0-0f04-5f16-bf47-79a0a84814ee)
Chapter 7 (#ulink_9bce60e8-624b-5ac5-b948-ebb2a18bf451)
Chapter 8 (#ulink_029d51e6-8fd3-5b8b-84a8-271ff14d8d93)
Chapter 9 (#ulink_c8a3b656-7c5c-59f4-8217-56a93b009e82)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Read an exclusive extract from Jon McGregor’s new novel, Reservoir 13
By the Same Author
A Note on the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher
Chapter 1 (#ulink_b7e5abe6-35b6-5eb6-a4bb-ae1630badf31)
If you listen, you can hear it.
The city, it sings.
If you stand quietly, at the foot of a garden, in the middle of a street, on the roof of a house.
It’s clearest at night, when the sound cuts more sharply across the surface of things, when the song reaches out to a place inside you.
It’s a wordless song, for the most, but it’s a song all the same, and nobody hearing it could doubt what it sings. And the song sings the loudest when you pick out each note.
The low soothing hum of air-conditioners, fanning out the heat and the smells of shops and cafes and offices across the city, winding up and winding down, long breaths layered upon each other, a lullaby hum for tired streets.
The rush of traffic still cutting across flyovers, even in the dark hours a constant crush of sound, tyres rolling across tarmac and engines rumbling, loose drains and manhole covers clack-clacking like cast-iron castanets.
Road-menders mending, choosing the hours of least interruption, rupturing the cold night air with drills and jack-hammers and pneumatic pumps, hard-sweating beneath the fizzing hiss of floodlights, shouting to each other like drummers in rock bands calling out rhythms, pasting new skin on the veins of the city.
Restless machines in workshops and factories with endless shifts, turning and pumping and steaming and sparking, pressing and rolling and weaving and printing, the hard crash and ring and clatter lifting out of echo-high buildings and sifting into the night, an unaudited product beside the paper and cloth and steel and bread, the packed and the bound and the made.
Lorries reversing, right round the arc of industrialparks, it seems every lorry in town is reversing, backing through gateways, easing up ramps, shrill-calling their presence while forklift trucks gas and prang around them, heaping and stacking and loading.
And all the alarms, calling for help, each district and quarter, each street and estate, each every way you turn has alarms going off, coming on, going off, coming on, a hammered ring like a lightning drum-roll, like a mesmeric bell-toll, the false and the real as loud as each other, crying their needs to the night like an understaffed orphanage, babies waawaa-ing in darkened wards.
Sung sirens, sliding through the streets, streaking blue light from distress to distress, the slow wail weaving urgency through the darkest of the dark hours, a lament lifted high, held above the rooftops and fading away, lifted high, flashing past, fading away.
And all these things sing constant, the machines and the sirens, the cars blurting hey and rumbling all headlong, the hoots and the shouts and the hums and the crackles, all come together and rouse like a choir, sinking and rising with the turn of the wind, the counter and solo, the harmony humming expecting more voices.
So listen.
Listen, and there is more to hear.
The rattle of a dustbin lid knocked to the floor.
The scrawl and scratch of two hackle-raised cats.
The sudden thundercrash of bottles emptied into crates.
The slam-slam of car doors, the changing of gears, the hobbled clip-clop of a slow walk home.
The rippled roll of shutters pulled down on late-night cafes, a crackled voice crying street names for taxis, a loud scream that lingers and cracks into laughter, a bang that might just be an old car backfiring, a callbox calling out for an answer, a treeful of birds tricked into morning, a whistle and a shout and a broken glass, a blare of soft music and a blam of hard beats, a barking and yelling and singing and crying and it all swells up all the rumbles and crashes and bangings and slams, all the noise and the rush and the non-stop wonder of the song of the city you can hear if you listen the song
and it stops
in some rare and sacred dead time, sandwiched between the late sleepers and the early risers, there is a miracle of silence.
Everything has stopped.
And silence drops down from out of the night, into this city, the briefest of silences, like a falter between heartbeats, like a darkness between blinks. Secretly, there is always this moment, an unexpected pause, a hesitation as one day is left behind and a new one begins.
A catch of breath as gasometer lungs begin slow exhalations.
A ring of tinnitus as thermostats interrupt air-conditioning fans.
These moments are there, always, but they are rarely noticed and they rarely last longer than a flicker of thought.
We are in that moment now, there is silence and the whole city is still.
The old tall-windowed mills, staggered across the skyline, they are silent, they are keeping their ghosts and their thoughts to themselves.
The smoked-glass offices, slung low to the ground, they are still, they are blankly reflecting the haze and shine of the night. Soon, they will resume their business, their coy whispers of ones and zeroes across networks of threaded glass, but now, for a moment, they are hushed. The buses in the depot, waiting for a new day, they are quiet, their metalwork easing and shrinking into place, settling and cooling after eighteen hours of heat and noise, eighteen hours of criss-crossing the city like wool on a loom.
And the clubs in the centre, they are empty, the dancefloors sticky and sore from a night’s pounding, the lights still turning and blinking, lost shoes and wallets and keys gathered in heaps.
And the night-fishers strung out along the canal, feeling the sing of their lines in the water, although they are within yards of each other they are saying nothing, watching luminous floats hang in the night like bottled fireflies, waiting for the dip and strike which will bring a centre to their time here, waiting for the quietness and calm they have come here to find.
Even the traffic scattered through these streets: the taxis and the cleaners, the shift-workers and the delivery drivers, even they are held still in this moment, trapped by traffic lights which synchronise red as the system cycles from old day to new, hundreds of feet resting on accelerators, hundreds of pairs of eyes hanging on the lights, all waiting for the amber, all waiting for the green.
The whole city has stopped.
And this is a pause worth savouring, because the world will soon be complicated again.
It’s the briefest of pauses, with not time enough to even turn full circle and look at all the lights this city throws out to the sky, and it’s a pause which is easily broken. A slamming door, a car alarm, a thin drift of music from half a mile away, and already the city is moving on, already tomorrow is here.
The music is coming from a curryhouse near the football ground, careering out of speakers placed outside to attract extra custom. The restaurant is almost empty, a bhindi masala in one corner, a special korma in the other, and the carpark is deserted except for a young couple standing with their arms around each other’s waists. They’ve not been a couple long, a few days perhaps, or a week, and they are both still excited and nervous with desire and possibility. They’ve come here to dance, drawn sideways from their route home by the music and by bravado, and now they are hesitating, unsure of how to begin, unfamiliar with the steps, embarrassed.
But they do begin, and as the first smudges of light seep into the sky from the east, from the far side of the city and in towards these streets, they hold their heads high and their backs straight and step together in time to the slide and wheel of the music. They dance with a style more suited to the ballroom than to the bollywood movies the music comes from, but they dance all the same, hips swinging, waists touching, eyes fixed on eyes. The waiters have come across to the window, they are laughing, they are calling uncle uncle to the man in the kitchen who is finally beginning to clean up after a long night. They dance, and he steps out of the door to watch, wiping his hands on his apron, licking the weary tips of his fingers, pulling at his long beard. They dance, and he smiles and nods and thinks of his wife sleeping at home, and thinks of when they were young and might still have done something like this.
Elsewhere, across the city, the day is beginning with a rush and a shout, the fast whine of office hoovers, the locked slam of lorry doors, the hurried clocking on of the early shifts.
But here, as the dawn sneaks up on the last day of summer, and as a man with tired hands watches a young couple dance in the carpark of his restaurant, there are only these: sparkling eyes, smudged lipstick, fading starlight, the crunching of feet on gravel, laughter, and a slow walk home.
He was the first to move, the boy from number eighteen.
He was up and across the street before anyone had blinked, before anyone had made a sound.
It was as if he knew what he had to do, as if he’d been waiting for the opportunity.
He moved off the doorstep like a loaded sprinter, and by the time I turned to see who it was he was there.
He was there and then it was over, and it was so sudden that I felt as though a camera flash had exploded in my face.
Everything went white, ghostly, like old news footage, faded and stained.
I couldn’t understand what was happening, I couldn’t believe what was happening.
I sat there, in the warm afternoon of the last day of summer, and I couldn’t work out what I was seeing.
I watched him moving across the street, the boy from number eighteen, and I tried to understand.
I don’t remember seeing it, not the moment itself, I remember strange details, peripheral images, small things that happened away from the blinded centre.
I remember the girl next to me dropping her can of beer and swaying backwards, as though from a shockwave.
I can picture the can hitting the ground, the weight of it crushing into the grass, the way it tipped to one side but stayed upright, like a half-fallen telegraph pole in a storm.
I can see a slow-motion image of the beer, frothing from the top of the can, a coil of it rising up like smoke, hanging in the light a moment before spreading flat into the grass and spraying across my lap.
I don’t know where that comes from.
I don’t know how I could possibly have seen these details.
The fizz of the beer popping into sparkles of air.
Blades of grass straightening themselves as the liquid soaks into the soil, the damp patch on my skirt shrinking and fading and drying in the sun.
The brightness of the light.
There was a woman leaning out of a high window, shaking a blanket.
There were some boys over the road having a barbecue, pushing a knife into the meat to see if it was cooked.
There was a man with a long beard, up a ladder at number twenty-five, painting his windowframes, he’d been there all day and he’d almost finished.
Each frame was gleaming wetly in the sun, a beautiful pale blue like the first faint colour of dawn and it had been nice to watch the slow thoroughness of his work.
There was a boy in the next-door garden, cleaning his trainers with a nailbrush and a bowl of soapy water.
I can see all these moments as though they were cast in stone, small moments captured and enlarged by the context, like figures in a Pompeii exhibition.
The woman with the blanket, interrupted mid-swing, her attention snatched away, the blanket losing momentum and flapping gently against the wall.
Her arms still stretched out, her lips still pursed against the billowing dust.
The blanket hanging down towards the ground, like a semaphore.
Somebody said oh my God.
A boy on a red tricycle rode into a tree.
His feet slipped off the pedals and got caught under the wheels, tugging him from his seat and down towards the ground.
I can see him, falling sideways, his leg about to scrape the concrete, his head about to hit the tree, his tricycle tipping onto two wheels and his attention clamped into the road.
His head kept turning as he fell, and when he hit the ground, he could only lie there, watching, like everyone else.
He can barely have been three years old, I wanted to run to him and cover his eyes but I couldn’t move so he kept on looking.
A man who’d been washing his car lifted both his hands to the top of his head, squeezing them into fists.
He was still holding a sponge, water crushing out of it and down his back but he didn’t move.
Somebody said oh shit oh shit oh shit.
But mostly there was this moment of absolute silence. Absolute stillness.
It can’t actually have been like that of course, there must still have been music playing, and traffic passing along the main road, but that’s the way I remember it, with this single weighted pause, the whole street frozen in a tableau of gaping mouths.
And the boy from number eighteen, moving through the locked moment like a blessing.
It seemed, or at least it seems now, that everything else was motionless.
The beercan caught between the hand and the ground.
The blanket not quite touching the wall.
The boy with the tricycle a flinch away from the tree.
A gasp in my throat, held back, like the air in the pinched neck of a balloon.
And it all seemed wrong somehow, unreal, unconnected to the sort of day it had been.
An uneventful day, slow and warm and quiet, people talking on their front steps, children playing, music, a barbecue.
I’d been woken when it first got light by the slamming of taxi doors, people I knew at number seventeen coming back from a long night out and trailing slowly down the street.
I hadn’t been able to get back to sleep, I’d stayed in bed and watched the sun brightening into the room, listened to the kids running outside, the familiar rattle of the boy’s tricycle.
Later, I’d got up and had breakfast and tried to start packing, I’d sat on the front step and drank tea and read magazines.
I’d gone to the shop and talked briefly to the boy at number eighteen, he was awkward and shy and it didn’t make sense that he would be the one to move so instantly across the street.
It rained, towards the end of the afternoon, suddenly and heavily, but that was all, there was nothing else unusual or unexpected about the day.
And somehow it seems wrong that there wasn’t a buildup, a feeling in the air, a premonition or a warning or a clue.
I wonder if there was, actually, if there was something I missed because I wasn’t paying attention.
The silence didn’t last long, people started rushing out into the street, shouting, flinging open windows and doors.
A woman from down the road ran out towards them and stopped halfway, turning back, shaking her hands in front of her face.
The man up the ladder made a call on his mobile before climbing down and leaving the last frame half-painted.
There were people I didn’t even recognise coming out of their houses to join the others.
But me and the other girl, Sarah, we just sat there, staring, holding our mouths open.
If we’d been closer, or younger, we might have held hands, tightly, but we didn’t.
I think she picked up her beer and drank a little more, and I think I drank as well.
I can’t remember, all I can remember is staring at the curtain of legs in the street, trying to see through.
Trying not to see through.
After a few minutes, the noise in the street seemed to quieten again.
The knot of people in the street loosened, turned aside.
People were looking to the main road, looking at their watches, waiting.
I remember noticing that there was still music coming out of half a dozen windows along the street, and then noticing that the songs were being silenced, one by one, like the lights going out at the end of The Waltons.
I remember a smell of burning, and seeing that the boys opposite had left their meat on the barbecue.
I could see the smoke starting to twist upwards.
I could see faces at windows.
I could see people glancing up, looking at the one door which was still closed.
Waiting for it to open, hoping that it might not.
I don’t understand why it seems so fresh in my mind, even now, three years later and a few hundred miles away.
I think about it, and I can’t even remember people’s names.
I just remember sitting there, those moments of waiting, murmurous and tense.
People striding to the end of the street, looking up and down the main road, stretching to see round the corner.
Turning back to the others and raising their hands.
The old man from number twenty-five, the brush in his hand, dribbling a trail of pale blue paint, walking towards the closed door.
Rubbing his bearded cheeks with the palm of his hand.
Knocking.
The distant careen of a siren, the man knocking at the door.
Chapter 2 (#ulink_a65c0c1f-13fd-5bdd-a496-f17245822e77)
A taxi drifts into the end of the street, its engine clicketing loudly as the doors open and half a dozen young people spill brightly out onto the pavement.
There is a pause; payment is made, the doors are slammed shut, and the taxi moves away, out of sight. And they stand there for a moment, blinking and grinning and waiting uncertainly, a tall thin girl with a short short skirt and eyes smudged with glitter, a boy with beige slacks and a ring through his eyebrow, a girl with enormous trainers and army trousers and her hair dyed pink and they are walking down the street, slowly, blissfully, their heads full of music and light, their nervous systems over-stimulated by hormones and chemicals and the exhilaration of the night.
A very short girl wearing nothing but shorts and a bra, her toenails painted the same violets and pinks and greens as her fingernails, she claps her hands, she looks at the sanded bare windowsills of number twenty-five, she says look they look naked, she looks at the tins of pale blue paint, the blue spilling down the side of the tin, she looks at the brushes and the scrapers and she says it’s a nice colour it’s going to look nice but nobody’s listening.
A boy wearing an almost clean white shirt, a tie looped loosely around his neck, he jumps up onto the garden wall of number nineteen, he balances on one leg, he says shush shush can you hear that and when the others stop and say what he says nothing, can you hear nothing it’s nice and he topples groundwards hoping the boy with the beige slacks and the pierced eyebrow can catch him.
On the other side of the street, in an upstairs bedroom at number twenty-two, a girl wakes up and hears someone talking about the quietness of the morning. She listens to the loud voice, it sounds familiar, she sits up in bed and puts her glasses on and looks at the people in the street. She knows them, some of them live at number seventeen, she wonders where they’ve been as she takes off her glasses and gets back into bed.
In the downstairs flat of number twenty, an old man with thinning hair and a carefully trimmed moustache is lying awake, listening to the noises outside. His eyes are open, frowning, focusing on what he can hear. He is listening for tell-tale signs, the crisp sound of a can being crumpled underfoot, the tinkle of a dropped bottle. His eyes sweep from side to side, concentrating, searching. But he doesn’t hear anything, and as the voices fade he closes his eyes again, turning face-down into the bed, away from the light, hoping for a little more sleep before the day begins.
Outside, the boy with the white shirt opens the door of number seventeen and the others follow him inside, whirling slowly around, gathering the objects they need to keep them safe, cartons of fruit juice and bottles of coke, bars of chocolate and tubes of crisps, tapes, CDs, cushions, duvets, cigarette papers, cigarettes, candles and burners and matches and drugs. And in the back bedroom they are settling down and they are talking, the tall thin girl with glitter round her eyes says don’t be so fucking daft man it’d go all over the floor and down your legs and that, and she giggles and turns to reach for a drink and as her face catches the candle-light her skin sparkles like shattered glass in the sun.
In the front first-floor bedroom of number nineteen a woman wakes suddenly. She looks at the clock, she looks at her sleeping husband, she wonders why she has woken. There is no noise from the street, the children are quiet. She eases softly out of bed, her bladder suddenly straining and full, she stands and she opens the door slowly enough for it not to squeak. On the way to the bathroom, she looks into the children’s bedroom and checks on each one of them, she crouches at the lower bunks and stretches up to the top one. She looks with sleepy love at the three of them, she watches their young bodies swelling and shrinking through her barely opened eyes, she holds her hand close to their faces to feel the warm give and suck of their breath. She murmurs a brief prayer for them and closes the door gently, soft-padding to the toilet, sitting and relieving herself and watching the shadows of pigeons flap across the bathroom wall.
The short girl with the painted toenails, next door, she says oh but did you see that guy on the balcony, he was nice, no he was special and she savours the word like a strawberry, you know she says, the one on the balcony, the one who was speeding and kept leaning right over, and they all know exactly who she means, he’s in the same place most weeks, pounding out the rhythm like a panelbeater, fists crashing down into the air, sweat splashing from his polished head.
She says once I was there and he got so carried away that he hung from the balcony by his legs, he had his feet hooked under the rail, and she remembers the way his face had stretched into a furious O, going come on let’s have some and she remembers his fists still flailing across the void like an astronaut lost in orbit.
A girl sleeps in the back bedroom of number eleven, her hair is pushed out of her eyes by a hairband, her mouth is wide open, the room is warm and beginning to lighten. Bird shadows pass quickly across her face but she does not wake.
A couple in their early thirties sleep in the attic flat of number twenty-one, wrapped loosely in a thin red blanket, he is snoring and she is turned away from him, there is a television on in the corner with the sound turned down, shadows pass through the room but the couple do not wake.
In the back bedroom of number seventeen, the boy with the white shirt and the tie says it was definitely a girl, she didn’t have an Adam’s apple, I swear, it was a girl definitely, and everyone laughs at him and he looks around the room and joins in the laughter and somebody passes him a long cigarette.
The boy with the wide trousers is quiet, he’s looking at the girl next to him, a beautifully unslim girl with dark curls of hair falling down over a red velvet dress, he’s looking at the laces and straps and buckles and zips of her complicated footwear and he looks up at her and says so how long does it take you to get those boots off then? She looks at him, this girl, with lips as red as the fire inside a chilli, she looks at the tight spread of him across the bed and she says
I don’t know I’ve never taken them off myself
and she smiles at the sharpness of his intake of breath, she watches his eyes trickle down from her face and roll down the rich geometry of her body.
And everyone else keeps talking, compulsively, talking across each other, talking about the tunes they heard and the people they saw and the next place they want to go. The boy with the white shirt and the tie keeps saying it was definitely a girl, and then he stuffs a pipe full of fresh green herb and the room quietens in anticipation, the conversation dropping, each of them suddenly feeling their minds too frantic, their bodies too tense, and they suck on the sweet smoke in turn, holding the pillow of it in their lungs, closing their eyes, stilling their voices.
And they think about daytime things for a moment, about rolling hills, or beaches, or playing football, or whatever it is they’ve learnt to think about at these times, and they breathe slowly and move for a moment into a kind of waking sleep. And if someone were to look through the window now, to walk into the backyard and press their face against the glass, cupping their hands around their eyes like a pair of binoculars, that person would see what looked like a roomful of people gathered together in silent prayer, and they would wonder who such a vigil might be for.
Outside, a taxi drives slowly down the street, the driver peering from the window, checking house numbers. He gets as far as number twenty-eight, and then there are no more numbers. He hesitates a moment before driving away, the sound of the car fading behind him like a trail of dust.
And now they are quiet, the girl with the army trousers trying to find a picture on the television, the boy with the pierced eyebrow holding a lighter beneath the plastic lid of a tube of crisps, a look of concentration in his eyes, waiting, watching the plastic soften.
The girl with the boots says I’m going home, I want to go home now.
Do you want to come with me she says to the boy with the wide trousers, walk me home she says, and her voice is thin and tired.
The boy with the shirt and tie is lying down on the floor, draping one arm across the tall girl who is still chewing gum and staring at the ceiling, dragging a duvet halfway across them both.
The short girl is curled up in a ball in the middle of the bed, waiting for the girl with the army trousers to come and keep her warm.
The boy with the pierced eyebrow lifts the lid to his mouth and blows, and a bubble of hot plastic shoots halfway across the room, flashing into place like a miracle, holding its long airship shape for a fraction of a second and then floating gently down towards the floor.
The girl with the boots offers her hand to the boy with the wide trousers, pulls him to his feet and kisses his forehead. Take me home she says and they drift slowly through the door.
The girl with the army trousers closes her eyes and collapses into the bed, adjusting herself gradually against the outline of the other girl’s body, wrapping around her like a nutshell.
In the first-floor flat of number eighteen, a young man sits up in bed, it’s early but he feels very awake, he looks around at the mess of his room and he thinks of all the things he wants to do today, needs to do. Sorting, packing, tidying, arranging. He rubs at his dry eyes with the tips of his fingers, he gets out of bed and walks across to the window. He sees two people in the middle of the road, he recognises the girl from number twenty-seven, he doesn’t recognise the boy and he wonders who he is. He picks up a camera and takes photographs of the morning, the two people in the street, the sunlight, the closed curtains of the windows opposite, he puts down the camera and makes notes in a small book, he writes the date, he details the things he has just photographed.
The young couple in the street, dancing, their arms curled gracefully around one another, the music from the restaurant carpark still in their heads, disappearing into her house, leaving the front door open, the street empty and quiet.
A cat, waiting on a doorstep.
Pigeons, dropping onto chimneytops.
Chapter 3 (#ulink_a2e854fd-9017-5e62-ade3-3814ce187ae9)
I’d been thinking about it when I called Sarah, the girl sitting next to me that day, I realised it had been a while since we’d spoken and it was probably my turn to call.
I said hi I just fancied a chat I wondered what you were up to and she said oh hi it’s been ages hasn’t it.
All our conversations seem to start like this now.
Once a month, maybe less, one of us will call the other and we’ll say oh hi it’s been ages we should try and meet up, and a plan will be made, and cancelled, or not quite made at all.
We’re not that far apart, maybe half an hour on the tube, but it’s been months since we’ve seen each other and every month it seems to matter less.
And so I sat in my room, that evening, and we talked about the usual things, about new jobs and plans for new jobs, about people we both knew and people we were meeting, about dates and possible dates.
I looked out of my open window, across the endless city, and I imagined her sitting by her window, looking in this direction, the telephone a shortcut through all those streets.
I wondered what her room looked like, what she could see from it.
She said so who have you spoken to lately, have you heard from Simon, and I said no not for a long time.
I thought about all the time we spent together, the three of us, the long days of that last summer in the house and I wondered how it had become so hard to keep in touch.
I remembered the promises we’d made to each other, me and Sarah and Simon, and I wondered if I’d been naive to think we could keep them.
I remembered how easily we used to talk, endlessly, making plans, deciding where we’d be in one and two and three years’ time, and I don’t remember mentioning this.
I had the appointment card on the table, the letter with the confirmation of results, and all I wanted to do was tell her about it, talk it over, like we would have done before.
I wanted to talk about why it was making me so scared, why there was a breathless panic fluttering up into my throat.
Sarah you’re not going to believe this, I wanted to say, or Sarah can I tell you something?
I wanted her to say oh calm down why don’t you, the way she did when I used to get worked up about deadlines and exams.
To say look no one’s dying here, we’re not talking about open-heart surgery, it’s normal, it’s a thing that happens.
I wanted her to give me some perspective, to say things out loud and make them seem a little more ordinary.
But I didn’t say anything, I just said oh I had a postcard from Peru, from someone called Rob, I said I couldn’t remember who he was.
She said you must do, he was that guy from over the road, he tried skating down that hill in the park, don’t you remember?
I smiled and said oh yes, and she said remember how no one went to help him because we were all laughing so much, and I laughed and held my hand to my mouth because it still seemed unfair to find it so funny, the way he went sprawling to the floor, arms flung out for balance, bellyflopping across the tarmac.
I said and remember how he had no skin on his arms for the rest of the summer, just those long grey scabs?
And she said I know I know, laughing, she said I can’t believe you’d forgotten, and I could picture the way she screwed her eyes up when she laughed.
We talked about other people, saying do you remember when, and how funny was that, and I wonder what happened to.
We talked about the medicine girl next door, the boy in Rob’s house who thought he could play the guitar, the good-looking boy down the road with the sketchpad.
We talked about the people at number seventeen, Alison who got her tongue pierced, and Chris, and the boy with the ring in his eyebrow but we couldn’t remember his name.
I tried to remember what it was like to be near so many people who knew me.
She said what’s Rob doing in Peru anyway, and I said I don’t know I think he’s saving the children or something.
Do you think he’s taken his skateboard she said, and I laughed and then remembered the way his hair got in his eyes when he was trying to pull off tricks.
The way his jeans always got scuffed under the heels of his trainers.
I thought about him being all those thousands of miles away, and I wondered how long the postcard had taken to reach me.
I read it again, looking at the long looping letters, trying to imagine the slow slur of his voice.
Things are going massively here it said, I’m having an ace time.
It said I’m not really homesick, but I’m missing decent cups of tea, it said you could write to me sometime.
I looked at the front of the card, at the pictures of Peru, smiling women in traditional dress, mountains, monkeys in fruit trees.
She said hello are you still there?
I said do you ever think about it, I mean, that last day.
She didn’t say anything for a moment, I heard a television in the background and I wondered where she was, if she was with anyone.
She said I try not to, it’s weird, you know, I’d rather forget about it.
It seems like a long time ago now she said.
I said I know but I can’t get it out of my head.
It keeps coming back I said, just recently, I don’t know why.
She was quiet, and I waited for her to say something.
I straightened the flowers in the vase on the table, pulled out the dead leaves.
I watched the traffic lights changing in the street outside.
She said what I always remember is the way everything carried on afterwards.
There were still buses going past on the main road she said, and some of the people on them turned to look for a moment but some of them didn’t even notice.
I wanted everything to stop she said, even if it was only for a little while.
There was nothing about it on the news she said, I knew there wouldn’t be but it didn’t seem right.
It just kind of happened and passed she said, and then we left and there was nothing to prove it had happened at all.
I said, you know, it’s the noise I can’t forget.
I still have dreams about it sometimes I said.
The way it echoed off the houses, and, oh, it just, I said.
And then we stopped talking and I could hear her breathing.
She said actually can we talk about something else now.
I said yes, sorry, it’s just I’ve been thinking, you know, lately, and she said well it’s a long time ago.
She said so anyway are you seeing anyone at the moment, and we talked about recent possibilities and failures, comparing notes.
And she said look my dinner’s nearly ready I’d better go.
I said oh sorry I didn’t realise, you’re eating late aren’t you and she said oh I do these days and we both said I’ll speak to you soon then bye.
I didn’t say who are you eating with are you eating on your own.
I sat there for a long time, after I put the phone down, the letter and the appointment card on the table, unmentioned.
I don’t know why I didn’t say anything to her about it, I don’t understand how I became fearful and closed off like this.
I sat there, watching the flowers quivering each time a lorry went past, feeling the tremble echo along the bones of my spine.
I saw the moon appearing, low and white over the park by the river.
I remembered the time Simon had called me through to his room, saying look out of the window, a dark night and the moon was bright and crisp away to the left, a thin crescent like a clipped fingernail.
And he’d said no no no but check this out, look over there, look over that way.
Pointing away to the right, to a second moon as bright and crisp as the first.
I’d looked at him, and he’d giggled and said how mad is that.
I’d looked at the two moons, each as clean and thin and new as each other, the same size, like twins of each other.
And I’d swung his window closed, and the reflection of the moon on the right swung away into the room with it and he said oh right yeah I thought it would be something like that.
I remembered this, and I wondered what he’d been doing the last few years, I wondered about all the people I haven’t seen or spoken to properly since then.
All the emails I get these days start with sorry but I’ve been so busy, and I don’t understand how we can be so busy and then have nothing to say to each other.
I read the letter again, and I sat very still, barely breathing, the streetlight striping the darkening room through the blinds.
I took off my shirt and bra and began touching my skin, very slowly, tracing the contours, pressing against the ridges and lines.
Running my fingers across all the marks and scars and spots, as though I could read my blemishes like braille.
I’m not sure what I was looking for.
I think I wanted to find something new, something visibly changed, something I could point to and say this is what it is, this is where it’s beginning.
But I couldn’t find anything.
I pressed the palm of my hand against my chest and tried to count my heartbeat.
It felt faster than it should be, and my skin felt hot, shining red, as though the blood was rushing to the surface and gasping for air.
I sat there for a long time, I fell asleep in the chair and when I woke up in the morning I was late for work.
Chapter 4 (#ulink_56797e27-bfcd-5174-9349-c49e82ec2721)
In the backyard of number nineteen, a woman is hanging out her washing, murmuring a song to herself and squinting against the light. She can see people sleeping in the back room of next door, she is glad they are quiet now, it means perhaps her children will sleep more.
She stoops for a handful of pegs and adjusts her headscarf. She hangs out a row of salwar kameez in different sizes, bright swathes of colour printed on thin fabric, she hangs out shirts, trousers, endless variations of underwear. And when she is done, and the whole yard is heavy with wavering lines of wet bunting, she straightens up and puts her hand to the hollow of her back, curves her face upwards. She interrupts her murmured song and listens to the muffled rumble of the morning. She breathes slowly and deeply, and for now the air smells clean, infused with the bright wetness of clean laundry.
The young man at number eighteen, with the dry eyes, he’s not dressed yet but he’s awake and he’s busy, he’s crouched on the floor, arranging a collection of objects and papers.
A page from a TV guide. An empty cigarette packet. A series of supermarket till receipts, stapled together in chronological sequence. Leaflets advertising bhangra alldayers and techno all-nighters. Train tickets. Death notices cut from local newspapers. An unopened packet of chewing gum.
He lays them all out on the floor, lays them out in size order, rearranges them in date order, blinking quickly. He stands back and looks, and writes out a list of the objects in front of him.
He turns on the television and picks up a polaroid camera. As soon as the screen warms up he takes a photograph of it, scribbling the time and the date on the back of the blank printout, seven a.m., thirty-one, oh eight, ninety-seven.
He lays the polaroid next to the cigarette packet, watching the shapes darken into colour and light. He turns back to the television, blinking, and watches Zoe talking about pop music in a London park, the soft morning light flitting through the trees and lighting up her hair, she says we’ll be having it large and he turns the television off.
Next door, in the bedroom of number twenty, an old man is lying awake beside his sleeping wife, he is holding his cupped palms close to his face and looking at the tiny flecks of blood he’s just coughed out of his lungs. He is fighting to control his breathing without waking his wife and he is looking at the pictures of their nephews and nieces, their great-nephews and greatnieces, propped up on the dressing table. He feels old, and he feels afraid. He listens to the steadiness of his wife’s breathing, and he thinks about the first night they spent together, a smuggled liaison in a seaside hotel nearly sixty years ago. He remembers the pattern on the wallpaper, the luxury of a three-bar electric fire, the view of the hills from the window. He remembers their shyness, standing awkwardly at the foot of the small bed and reaching out very slowly, kissing once, twice, moving uncertainly to hold each other and gradually allowing their curiosity to prevail. He remembers her insisting that the light be kept on until they slept, and that their clothes be folded neatly. And most of all he remembers how wonderfully startled they both were by their eventual intimacy.
He lies still, listening to his wife, waiting for the morning.
In the attic of number twelve, a young man is leaning out of the window, stripped to the waist. He is smoking a cigarette, holding it away to one side and making sure he blows all the smoke out into the air, and he is thinking about the day ahead.
He finishes the cigarette and drops it down into the street, watching it fall, the way it glows brightly as it accelerates towards the ground, the way it bursts into sparks on the pavement below. He turns back into his room, unwrapping a stick of chewing gum from his bedside drawer, taking a wallet from under his pillow and emptying out the cash. He sits crosslegged on the bed, running a flat hand across his forehead and through his thick black hair, looking at the folded notes with a bounce and a jig of excitement. He counts the money, again, smoothing the creases, sorting the fives from the tens, stacking them in ten neat piles of a hundred pounds each. He grins, biting his lip, nodding his head and tucking the notes back into his wallet, the wallet back under his pillow. Today he thinks, today today, and he lies on his back, one hand behind his head, the other hand a fist which he kisses and shakes in the air. He closes his eyes, but he doesn’t sleep.
At number eighteen, the boy with the sore dry eyes pulls a shoebox from a high shelf and sorts through the polaroids inside, he picks out a handful and fans them out on the floor like a poker spread. A picture of a lamp-post covered in marker-pen graffiti, Uz 4 Shaf 4 eva 9T7, Izzy is fit signed who, Lee an me wuz busy like bee, Sian equals slag, and so on and so, the soap opera of the street corner marked out in rain-faded initials and abbreviations.
A picture of a fly-posted garage door, poster layered upon poster, streaks torn through the layers of dates and venues and djs and bands, the top corner peeling off under the weight to reveal bare metal.
Empty drums of vegetable oil piled up outside a curryhouse like tins in a nineteen fifties supermarket.
A traffic jam at night, beaded white lights stringing down the road like christmas decorations, rain splashed on the camera lens.
Dark dribbles of blood in a pub carpark.
He picks up the camera again and carries it through to the bathroom, he takes a picture of himself in the mirror. He blinks, tightly and painfully, laying the camera down and holding the palms of his hands to his eyes, screwing his face up, rocking his head.
The colours in the polaroid wake into the light, his selfportrait taking shape while he searches for eyedrops, his blind hand like an addict in a medicine cabinet, knocking over shampoos and deodorants and razors.
In the back room of number seventeen, the girl with the glitter around her eyes is lying awake, chewing gum, looking at her sleeping friends. She knows she’ll be awake for some time yet, her brain is piled high with powders and pills and the muscles in her legs are still twitching from the dancefloor. She looks at the girls on the bed, the one curled around the other, protectively, she watches their shoulders and breasts rise and fall, shifting gently into position, she thinks about the piercing in the short girl’s tongue and wonders if it’s true what they say. The stereo is still playing, very quietly, she watches the small green lights bubbling up and down with the music, she listens to the singer going doowah doowah, I love you so, oohwoah. She feels the good strong weight of the white-shirted boy’s arm across her chest, she tilts her head forward to kiss it. The music goes doowah doowah I love you so, and she thinks about the two of them. They haven’t spoken about it, they haven’t said what will we do when we leave here, do you want to come with me, let’s work something out, and she knows that this means they will quickly and easily drift apart, into other people’s lives, into other people’s arms in rooms like this. She is surprised that this doesn’t make her feel sad. She listens to the music, she looks around at the things people dropped when they fell asleep or went out of the room, she kisses the boy’s arm again and she feels only a kind of sweet nostalgia. She wonders if you can feel nostalgic for something before it’s in the past, she wonders if perhaps her vocabulary is too small or if her chemical intake has corroded it and the music goes doowoah doowoah.
In the bathroom of number eighteen, a face looks out from the polaroid, wide-eyed, composed. A young man, early twenties, a smooth round face, straight nose, full lips, pale hair losing thickness around the temples, a buckle of skin folded below each eye. It’s a good picture, and in a moment he will date it and place it with the other objects he has collected together on his bedroom floor, a magazine article, a half-finished crossword, a twin-bladed razor.
But for now he has his head tipped up to the ceiling, a capful of solution bathing the dryness of his eyes, one hand gripping the sink until the ache subsides.
It’s light that makes his eyes hurt, mostly, bright or sudden light, and the dust in the air. It’s a rough prickling sensation, like sandpaper pressed up against the skin of his eye, a dryness he can mostly soothe by blinking rapidly, squeezing moisture across the surface.
It’s worse in the city, with all the dust and the dirt, and it’s worse in the summer, with the long bright days, but usually it’s bearable, usually he doesn’t notice and he just keeps blinking away that gritted feeling. And if it gets too much, like it has now, he comes to his bathroom and bathes his eyes, and it’s a relief like finding a spring welling up in the desert.
He puts the eyedrops back into the cabinet, scratching the back of his hand, he picks up the camera and the selfportrait and returns to his bedroom, he wonders what else he might hide away with this collection. And he thinks about the girl at number twenty-two.
In the street, the front door of number thirteen is swinging gradually open, a young boy who can barely reach the doorhandle is peering around the door, his hair is sticking up and he is still wearing his pyjamas. He climbs onto a bright red tricycle which is waiting for him on the front path, he pushes all his weight onto the pedals and he creaks out of his garden and onto the main pavement. He looks back at the still open front door, he looks ahead of him to the main road, he puts his head down and he pedals, slowly at first, bumping and wobbling over loose paving slabs, picking up speed.
A streetcleaner whirrs past, brushes spinning and skidding across the tarmac, grit and glass and paper skipping up into its innards. The driver stares sleepily ahead, sunglasses curled across his face, lips mouthing the words of the song on the radio, I’ll be there for you, when the rain starts to fall. As he passes number nineteen he glances across at a girl sitting on the garden wall, a girl in a red velvet dress wearing very tall boots, she has her face arched up to the sky and a boy in wide trousers is gently kissing the tight curve of her throat. The streetcleaner whirrs away around the corner and the girl takes the boy’s hand and bites his little finger. He makes a noise, a soft noise and his eyes are closed and his stomach is like it was left behind over a humpbacked bridge and she says shall we go now and they both stand.
They hear voices then, shouted voices crashing down from the attic flat of number twenty-one, a woman’s voice shouting no but listen will you, listen to me, it’s not okay is it you shit you weren’t thinking about me were you you just went off out and did what you wanted to do it’s always about what you want isn’t it you selfish fucking wanker and what about me what about me she screams and the woman between the washing in next-door’s backyard stands and wonders how these people manage to shout at one another so much and still walk in the street with a hand in a hand. Shut up says the man’s voice, just shut up, shut up shut up will you please shut the fucking fuck up please? and his voice rises and rises until it sounds almost like the woman’s and it cracks and it breaks.
The girl and the boy outside, they look at each other and they hurry away down the road, and when they turn the corner the street is empty and quiet again.
The street is empty and quiet and still, the light is brightening, shadows hardening, the haze of dawn burning away. The day will soon burn with a particular brightness, hot and lethargic and tense. Later, it will rain, hard, suddenly, and the hot tarmac will steam and shine as water streaks across the surface into the gutters. And windows will be hurriedly closed, and people will stand in doorways, in shocked silences. But now, in this early beginning, it is dry, and the street is beginning to warm, and people sleep, or lie restlessly awake, or make love and sleep again.
Chapter 5 (#ulink_b356d09d-caa6-5d10-824f-d1b019c54a28)
The day after speaking to Sarah I tried telling my mother.
I took the phone into my room, I sat on the floor with my knees pulled up into my chest and I started to dial the number.
I looked at a photograph on the wall, taken that summer, taken a few days before it happened.
Half a dozen of us, huddled together in a front garden, ashtrays and cushions spread across the grass, a speaker mounted in the front-room window, a beanbag spilling its beans across the pavement.
It’s a photo that makes us look young, it makes all of us look very young.
Our faces taut and shining, grinning awkwardly, squinting into the sunlight, everyone’s arms around everyone else.
Waving cans of beer as though they were novelties.
Looking like we thought everything was going to last forever.
I put the phone down before it started ringing, and I looked at the other pictures.
The photo of Simon must have been taken the same day, the day he left.
He’s sat in the front passenger seat of his dad’s car, window wound down, waving.
His dad’s at the back of the car, leaning all his weight on the boot, trying to get it closed against three years’ worth of possessions.
Against duvets and pillows, a stereo, a television, books and magazines and folders full of notes.
Against plates, saucepans, cutlery, a shoebox full of halffinished condiments, a food processor with the attachments missing.
A box of CDs, a box of videos, a box full of photographs and postcards and letters.
And a standard lamp, which he bought in a junk shop to make his room look civilised, lunging over his shoulder from the mess behind him.
All of it squeezed into his dad’s car, and he sits there and smiles and holds his open hand up beside his face.
In the background there’s a boy on a tricycle, staring.
There’s a photo of me and another girl, Alison, and I can’t remember who took it.
I’m standing next to her, pointing, shocked and laughing, and I’m surprised to see how similar I look, really, the same short blonde hair, the same small square glasses.
Alison’s pulling a wideopen face at the camera, freshly studded tongue flaring out of her mouth, fingers curled out like cat-claws.
And I’m pointing at her tongue and looking right into the lens, looking right out at myself these few years later, with a telephone in my hand, unable to dial.
I sat there thinking about the day she’d got it done, talked into it by the boy with the ring through his eyebrow who lived in her house, how she kept changing her mind all morning.
Eventually she went to a place round the corner, an upstairs place with a sign on the door saying no children no spectators.
It was a week before she could speak properly again, and then all she talked about was how excited and pleased she was with it.
She kept sticking her tongue out at men in the pub, just to see how they’d react.
By the end of the summer she was saying she might have to take it out to get a job.
It was a strange time.
People were slipping out of the city unexpectedly, like children getting lost in a crowd, leaving nothing but temporary addresses and promises to keep in touch.
I didn’t know what to do, there was a feeling of time running out and a loss of momentum, of opportunities wasted.
It was a good summer, long and hot, the days cracked open and bare, but it was hard to enjoy when it felt so deadended.
We spent our days on the front doorstep, circling job adverts with optimistic red felt-pens, trying to make plans, talking about travelling, or moving to London, or opening a cafe, each plan sounding definite until the next morning.
I don’t think any of us had the confidence, not for the sort of plans we were making, not for all those websites and fashion boutiques and doughnut shops.
A time of easy certainty had come to an end, and most of us had lost our nerve.
We used to sit on those front steps long into the evenings, long after the conversations had faltered, dragging our duvets downstairs when the stars finally squeezed out, flicking the ringpulls of empty beercans, blowing tunes into empty wine bottles.
Wondering what to do next.
Most of the photos I’ve got were taken in that last week, rushing around, trying to make up for three unrecorded years.
Pictures of the house, my bedroom, the front door with the number painted on it, the view of the street from my window.
But mostly the pictures are of my friends then, drinking tea in the kitchen, piled up in someone’s bed, throwing a frisbee across the street.
And in all the pictures they’re looking straight at the camera, always grinning and waving.
I sat in my room that evening, the phone still in my hand, looking at all those photographs, looking closely, as though I’d not seen them before.
Studying the expressions on their faces, looking for hidden details.
It was strange how important the pictures felt, like vital documents that should be kept in a fireproof tin instead of being blu-tacked and pinned to the wall.
Somehow, although we spent the whole summer doing nothing, it felt like the most significant part of my life, until now.
I dialled the number again, and it was engaged.
I don’t think I knew what I was going to say. I don’t know why I thought I’d find it any easier to tell her than Sarah.
I think I thought that, once I’d managed to say it, she’d at least be the one who would be able to help.
I think I hoped there would be shock and tearful reaction, that then she’d offer practical help and sensible advice.
That maybe she’d say why don’t you come and stay for a few days and we’ll talk it through, you and me and your dad.
Like a family, like a proper family.
I don’t know why I thought these things, I don’t know why I thought anything would be any different suddenly.
Perhaps I thought that exceptional circumstances could change the way of things.
I sat there, listening to the engaged tone, trying to think of the right words.
Telephone conversations with my mother are never very easy.
There always seems to be a weighting inside them, things left unspoken, things not fully spoken.
She says things gently and discreetly, carefully holding back her full implication.
Like holding playing cards against her chest.
When I told her about my latest new job she said that sounds very nice and what other opportunities have you been looking at?
She says things like, I don’t think you’re making full use of your degree, my love.
She says things like, it doesn’t sound as though you’re stretching yourself.
She doesn’t say what the hell kind of a job is that, or what are you actually doing with your life here?
I wonder if I wish she would.
I got through eventually.
My dad answered, he picked up the phone and sighed and said yes, please?
He’s always answered the phone like that, as though he was afraid of who might be trying to speak to him, of what they might be intending to say.
I said hi dad it’s me, is mum there, and he said no, no she’s not, she’s gone out tonight.
I’m not sure whether I was disappointed or relieved.
I could hear him clutching the phone tightly, holding it away from his face as though he didn’t think it was entirely safe, the way he always does, and I knew that I wouldn’t say anything to him.
I knew it was a secret I would be keeping to myself a little longer.
He asked me about my job, he asked me about people I haven’t seen for a long time and I said they were fine.
I said something about football, and then I let him get back to watching the television.
I put the phone down and imagined what I might have said, mum there’s something I have to say, or mum I need to talk to you about something.
Mum I’m not sure how to say this but.
I think I was hoping she might realise something was wrong without me having to say so, that I could talk about my new shoes and she would say so what is it you’re really telling me?
Like the mum in the old British Telecom adverts.
I looked at another photograph, of Simon and Rob and Jamie dancing naked down the street in the first pale hours of that summer, celebrating the election.
I remembered that momentous night, looping a cable through the window and setting the TV up in the front garden, gathering around it with pizza and weed and the excitement of history.
I remembered coming back from the garage at midnight, armed with fresh snack supplies and seeing my friends’ faces lit up by the shrine of the television.
Shining and blue and flickering in the darkness.
Already looking like ghosts.
Chapter 6 (#ulink_46c0ba55-3607-5607-9faa-c8aabe4d3767)
The woman at number nineteen, she has finished hanging out her washing, and now she steps into her kitchen and begins to think about breakfast. The children will be waking soon, and the whole household will begin then to fumble into the morning, her husband, her husband’s father, her husband’s mother. She reaches up to the cupboard over the sink and fetches down boxes of cereal, four packets of sugared grains and flakes which she clutches to her chest. As she turns to drop them on the table she sees her young daughter leaning against the doorframe, watching her with her big worried eyes. Before she can say anything, her daughter is hurrying to the cutlery drawer, counting out spoons, turning to the crockery cupboard, struggling with the bowls. She is still wearing her night-clothes. Hey, hey, says her mother, smiling, dress first, washing and clothing okay? And she takes her little arms and hustles her out of the kitchen. The child does not say a word, and the mother listens to her shuffling up the stairs, a shadow of concern skimming briefly across her face.
She finishes preparing the breakfast table, and as she puts the kettle on to boil the twin boys come rattling down the stairs and launch into the food, clutching their spoons like fighting sticks. She tries to talk to them about the day, what are they going to do and would they like to go with Nana and Papa to see Auntie for tea, but their mouths are full of soggy cereal and it is all they can do to breathe between shovelfuls. She relents, and tells them they must not go further than the shop at the end of the street and that they must not go into people’s gardens without asking.
She strokes them both on the head, as if to bless their day, and she tells them to be good, and as they leave the room she sees again her daughter standing in the doorway, her head leaning up against the frame and her big eyes looking blankly upwards. She is wearing the floral dress with the gold edge which was made for her by Auntie, she is looking pretty she thinks. She says what would you like, and the young girl says nothing but slides into the chair vacated by her brother and pours herself a bowl of wheatflakes. She eats slowly, gathering the flakes into small spoonfuls, looking out of the window, chewing each portion thoughtfully.
And when she is finished she turns to her mother and says mummy can I watch cartoons now, just like that, no expression, as if she were a child extra in a cheap soap opera and not the centre of a loving family. Her mother nods her assent and watches her drift through to the front room, trailing her hand along the wallpaper.
Perhaps she is nervous about starting school, she thinks to herself, or perhaps she is becoming poorly. She turns to the window and touches her face, she is feeling weary of the day already. The boys stamp down the stairs and out of the front door. It is not yet eight o’clock. She runs the tap to wash the children’s dishes. She clenches her fist under the rushing water until it becomes hot, she holds it there.
The man in the attic flat of number twenty-one, he is watching the twin boys from next door running in the street, he is leaning from the window to smoke a cigarette, he is being watched by the woman lying on the bed behind him. They are both naked. They’re out already he says, them kids from next door, they’re out already, what time is it? You probably woke them up with your snoring the woman says, rolling onto her side and stretching across the floor to pick up her watch. They’re cheeky little shits them two the man says, I saw them throwing stones at those girls over the road last week, when they was sitting in their own garden. Probably just looking for attention the woman says, you know what boys are like. It’s not even eight she says, I’m going back to sleep she says, but she doesn’t and she lies awake looking at the nakedness of the man, at his feet tilted upwards and the tension rising up the muscles of his legs as he stretches to lean out of the window, and the rise and pause and fall of the curve of his shoulders as he savours his cigarette. At the small dragon tattoo on his shoulderblade. At the long pink lines and the small purple scuff marks scattered all over his skin, scratches and bruises she’s gifted him in heated moments of fury and passion.
She props herself up on one elbow and catches sight of herself in the mirror, she looks at herself, her skin clean and unmarked except for a single thumb-sized bruise at the top of one arm. She looks at her hair, newly dyed a deep henna red, she turns a length of it in her fingers. She’s still pleased with it, even though he hasn’t yet said anything. She likes the way it complements her eyes.
They’re looking in people’s windows now the man says, his irritation furrelling over his shoulder like smoke, what are they playing at? Forget it she says, come back to bed she says, and she rolls to one side to make room for him. Little fuckers he says, they’ve got water-pistols he says, and he turns away, back into the room, striding across the floor to squash his cigarette end into the ashtray. What did you say he says to the woman, I missed that. She says, I told you to come back to bed and she reaches out her arm towards him and when he kisses her the stubble on his face smells of smoke and sunshine.
In the street outside, the twins from number nineteen are peering into the front window of number twenty, the slightly older one balanced on a pair of bricks to see better, looking through a small gap in the curtains. In the room in front of them, a man with thinning hair and a carefully trimmed moustache is doing stretching exercises, lifting his pale arms high in the air, lowering them towards the floor, placing his hands on his fleshy hips, arching his body from side to side. He is completely naked, and the boys suddenly giggle out loud and cover their mouths, the man with the tidy moustache turning and waving them away, dragging the curtains more fully closed.
They vanish, and he stands by the now safely shielded window, clenching and unclenching his fists, breathing a little heavily. They are not good boys, he is thinking, they are not good boys at all. He has seen them, he knows about them, he has seen them dropping their crisp bags in the street, their sweet wrappings. He stretches his hands towards the floor, his knees almost straight, his bony fingers only half a dozen inches from the carpet. He straightens, slowly and carefully, he puts on a dressing gown and he steps into his small kitchen, reaching for the kettle, glancing into the backyard and his hands yank suddenly up into the air as if he were shaking out a tablecloth and he mutters shameful words, he says to nobody what is it now? where does it come from all of this? and he pulls down the kitchen blind so that he does not have to look at it.
In the flat upstairs, an old man is looking for a box of matches to light the gas under the kettle, he turns to the table and he sees an envelope lying there, his name scratched across it in wavering handwriting. He smiles, he turns and opens the cutlery drawer of the Welsh dresser, he takes out an envelope with his wife’s name on it, his own handwriting as newly unreliable as hers.
He places the two cards side by side, he thinks about opening his for a moment and decides not to. He looks for the matches, and he thinks about that day.
It wasn’t a spectacular wedding. It happened in a hurry, and they only spent one night together before he went away again, went away properly. They’d been told to tie up their loose ends, and they knew what that meant, so he’d sent her a telegram, just before his leave, saying are you at a loose end stop buy a nice dress stop will buy rings stop, and they’d rushed off to the registry office, dragging in the woman from the cake shop for a witness.
But it was a wedding, and they looked each other in the eyes and said the words, they made their vows and they have kept them all these years.
Her hand in his hand, watching him say to love and to cherish, watching him say until death us do part.
When they kissed, as they were signing the register, the woman from the cake shop turned her face away, as though she was embarrassed.
And they took the wedding certificate back to their new house, propped it up on the chest of drawers at the foot of the bed, and spent the whole evening looking at it, both feeling as though they’d just stepped off a fairground ride, both feeling dizzy and exhilarated, struggling to get their breath back, struggling to absorb everything that had happened.
She said, tell me the story of us, tell me it the way you’ll tell our children when they ask.
She said it a lot, in those first few years, when she was feeling sad, or poorly, or she couldn’t sleep. She’d lay her head on his chest, her hands tucked up under her chin, and she’d say tell me the story of us, tell me it the way you’d tell our children.
And he’d always say it the same way, starting once upon a time there was a handsome soldier boy with a smart uniform and he went to a dance with his friends and minded his own business, and she’d always lift her head up and pull a shocked face and say you were not minding your own business you were making eyes at me all evening you’re a big fat liar.
And he’d always put two fingers to her lips and say so the handsome soldier boy was surprised to see a nice-looking young lady standing in front of him and asking him to dance, and she’d say what happened then, did they dance, did they dance well?
Oh yes, he’d always say, yes indeed, they did dance, and they danced very well, spinning and twirling and looking deeply in one another’s eyes so they didn’t know everyone else was looking at them so amazed and you know what happened that very moment he’d say, not waiting for her response, what happened without them even knowing was they were in love.
And then? she’d say, what happened then? Did they kiss? and he’d say no no, not so soon, he was a gentleman you see, a gentleman as well as a soldier and so he didn’t kiss her until the second time they met he’d say, and she would ask him for more details and he would tell them to her, their first meetings, where they went to, what they did, the first night they spent together in the hotel in Blackpool and she’d say you mustn’t tell the children about that bit and he’d laugh and say no.
And that first time he’d told the story, that night, lying side by side on the bed, fully clothed, neither of them said anything when he finished, they just lay there looking at the certificate, looking at the official type, the formal words, looking at their names laid down in sloping black ink.
And she’d whispered it’s a good story isn’t it?, unbuttoning his shirt, spreading her fingers out across his chest as though smoothing wrinkles from a bedsheet, and he’d said yes, yes it is, it’s a good story. And the last thing she’d said to him, just before she went to sleep that night, quietly, almost as though she thought he was asleep, she said you will come back won’t you, you will keep safe, please, you will come home?
Chapter 7 (#ulink_218f54a8-f5f2-556d-a8c7-b0ae8558480f)
When I got back from that first appointment it rained for a day and a half.
It woke me up in the middle of the night, a quiet noise at first, burbling across the roof, spattering through the leaves of the trees, and it was good to lie there for a while and listen to it.
But later, when I got up, it was heavier and faster, pouring streaks down the windows, exploding into ricochets on the pavement outside.
I stood by the window watching people in the street struggle with umbrellas.
I phoned work and said I can’t come in I’m sick.
I thought about what my mother would say if she saw me skiving like this, I remembered what she said when I was a child and stuck indoors over rainy weekends.
There’s no use mooching and moping about it she’d say, it’s just the way things are.
Why don’t you play a game she’d say, clapping her hands as if to snap me out of it.
And I’d ask her to point out all the one-player games and she’d tut and leave the room.
I wonder if that’s what she’ll say when I finally tell her, that it’s the way things are, that there’s no use mooching and moping about it.
It doesn’t seem entirely unlikely.
She used to lecture me about it, about taking what you’re given and making the most of it.
Look at me with your dad she’d say, gesturing at him, and I could never tell if she was joking or not.
But it’s how she was, she would always find a plan B if things didn’t go straight, she would always find a way to keep busy.
If it was raining, and she couldn’t hang the washing out, she would kneel over the bath and wring it all through, savagely, until it was dry enough to be folded and put away.
If money was short, which was rare, she would march to the job centre and demand an evening position of quality and standing.
That was what she said, quality and standing, and when they offered her a cleaning job or a shift at the meatpackers she would take it and be grateful.
She always said that, she said you should take it and be grateful.
And so I tried to follow her example that day, hemmed in by the rain, I sat at the table and read all the information they gave me at the clinic.
I tried to take in all the advice in the leaflets, the dietary suggestions, the lifestyle recommendations, the discussions of various options and alternatives.
I read it all very carefully, trying to make sure I understood, making a separate note of the useful telephone numbers.
I even got out a highlighter pen and started marking out sections of particular interest, I thought it was something my mother might approve of.
But it was difficult to absorb much of the information, any of the information, I kept looking through the window and I felt like a sponge left out in the rain, waterlogged, useless.
I was distracted by the pictures, by all these people looking radiant and cheerful, smartly dressed and relaxed.
I knew I didn’t look like that, I knew I didn’t feel relaxed or cheerful.
I didn’t feel able to accept what my body was doing to me, and I still don’t.
It felt like a betrayal, and it still does.
And I kept trying to tell myself to calm down.
To tell myself that this is not something out of the ordinary, this is something that happens.
This is not an unbearable disaster, a thing to be bravely soldiered through.
It’s something that happens.
But I think I need somebody to say these words for me to believe them, I don’t think I can speak clearly or loudly enough when I say them to myself.
One of the leaflets mentioned telling people, who to tell, how long to wait.
I thought about why I haven’t told anyone yet, and what this means.
Perhaps not telling people makes it less real, perhaps it’s not even definite yet, really.
Perhaps I need time to get used to the idea of it, before people’s good intentions start hammering down upon me like rain.
Another of the leaflets had a section on physical effects.
You may find you become tired it said, you may find yourself experiencing dizziness, insomnia, a change in appetite.
There was a list of these things, half a dozen pages of alphabetical discomforts and pains.
I spent a long time thinking about them all, wondering which ones I’d get, wondering how well I would cope.
I thought about backache, nausea, indigestion, faintness and cramps and piles.
I thought about waking in the night with a screaming pain, clutching at the covers with clawed hands.
I thought about banging my fists against my head to distract myself from it.
I thought about religious people who train themselves to walk over burning coals and I wondered if I could control my body in the same way.
I didn’t think I could, and I got scared and gathered all the leaflets up, stacked them away in a kitchen drawer with the scissors and sellotape and elastic bands.
By the middle of the afternoon it had rained so much that the drains were overflowing, clogged up with leaves and newspapers.
The water built up until it was sliding across the road in great sheets, rippled by the wind and parted like a football crowd by passing cars.
I was shocked by the sheer volume of water that came pouring out of the darkness of the sky.
Watching the weight of it crashing into the ground made me feel like a very young child, unable to understand what was really happening.
Like trying to understand radio waves, or imagining computers communicating along glass cables.
I leant my face against the window as the rain piled upon it, streaming down in waves, blurring my vision, making the shops opposite waver and disappear.
There was a time when I might have found this exhilarating, even miraculous, but not that day.
That day it made me nervous and tense, unable to concentrate on anything while the noise of it clattered against the windows and the roof.
I kept opening the door to look for clear skies, and slamming it shut again.
And then around teatime, from nowhere, I smashed all the dirty plates and mugs into the washing-up bowl.
Something swept through me, swept out of and over me, something unstoppable, like water surging from a broken tap and flooding across the kitchen floor.
I don’t quite understand why I felt that way, why I reacted like that.
I wanted to be saying it’s just something that happens.
But I was there, that day, slamming the kitchen door over and over again until the handle came loose.
Smacking my hand against the worktop, kicking the cupboard doors, throwing the plates into the sink.
Going fuckfuckfuck through my clenched teeth.
I wanted someone to see me, I wanted someone to come rushing in, to take hold of me and say hey hey what are you doing, hey come on, what’s wrong.
But there was no one there, and no one came.
I stopped eventually, when I noticed my hands were bleeding.
I must have cut them with the smashed pieces of crockery, picking pieces out of the sink to throw them back in.
I stood still for a few moments, breathing heavily, watching blood drip from my hands onto the broken plates, wanting to sit down but unable to move.
I watched the blood pooling across the palms of my hands.
I looked at the broken plates and mugs.
I wondered where such a fierce rage had come from, and I was scared by the scale of it, by the lack of control I’d had for those few minutes.
I don’t remember ever feeling like that before, and it worried me to think that I might be changing in ways I could do nothing about.
I washed my hands clean, letting the blood and water pour over the broken crockery, counting about a dozen cuts, each as thin as paper.
The water began to sting, so I wrapped my hands in kitchen towel and held them up into the air, leaning back against the worktop, watching the blood soak through.
Later, when the bleeding had stopped and I’d covered my hands in a patchwork of plasters I found in the bathroom, I tried to get myself some food.
I thought it would make me feel better.
I’d been planning to go out and buy something, but I couldn’t face it so I stayed in and ate what I could find.
Peanut butter, sardines, cream crackers, marshmallows.
It gave me a belly-ache, which seemed an appropriate end to a bad day, a wasted and damaged day.
And it kept on raining, rattling endlessly into the ground, piling up in the streets, wedged into the gutters and the drains.
It made the street look squalid and greasy.
People were scurrying along the pavement, their coats tugged tightly around themselves, their heads bowed as though they had something to hide.
And I was locking the door and closing the curtains, and I did have something to hide.
Chapter 8 (#ulink_820c8df4-4fba-5364-bf9e-b27b015c33b3)
At number eighteen, the boy with the sore eyes is crouching on the floor among his arrangement of things, he is still thinking about the girl at number twenty-two, the girl with the short blonde hair and the little square glasses, the girl with the nicest sweetest smile he thinks.
He’s thinking about the time he met her properly, besides seeing her in the street and sometimes saying hello, the time at a party round the corner when she’d stood and talked with him for a long part of the evening, and hadn’t seemed to notice his blinking and hand scratching, perhaps because it was dark or perhaps because she didn’t make him feel nervous by acting as though he was, the way most people do. They talked a lot, and laughed, and poured each other drinks and he’d felt comfortable and good and real with her, and she’d touched his arm once or twice, and looked him in the eye without saying anything, and although they hadn’t kissed he thinks probably they could have done. It was there is what he thinks. And she’d asked him to walk her home because she felt tired and a bit uncomfortable and so he did and she held onto his arm for support, held on quite tightly because she said the pavement was moving like on a boat and she said sorry I’m not normally this drunk honestly and laughed. She laughed a lot, that night. And just before she went inside he said, very quickly, do you want to go out sometime, for a drink or something or? And she’d grinned a big squint-eyed grin and said yes yes, Wednesday night, I’ll come round Wednesday night and we’ll go somewhere and then she’d gone in and closed the door and he’d gone home and barely slept until dawn.
Next door, in the back bedroom of number sixteen, a young girl is playing by herself. She has a picture book with removable sticky figures, she is removing them and replacing them, standing them on their heads on the tops of houses, making them swim in duckponds, dropping them from a height and seeing where they land. She is waiting for her father to wake, so she can have breakfast and get dressed.
He rubs at his bloodshot eyes, the young man next door, he piles up his collection of things and squeezes them into a coffee jar, writing the date and his name on a sticker on the lid. He thinks about that Wednesday night, waiting in, trying to be relaxed, waiting for the doorbell, checking that it worked, putting music on and off. Sitting outside at midnight and realising she wasn’t coming.
He pulls the large floor-rug to one side and lifts up a loose section of floorboard. His brother, when he’d emailed him about it, had said well she was probably just so drunk she forgot, that’s all it is, go and talk to her again, she’ll still be up for it, but he’d never been so sure, maybe she’d forgotten or maybe really she’d changed her mind. Maybe she’d been too embarrassed to say anything to him about it. He remembers the next time he’d seen her, how she’d looked at him vaguely and said hello and looked away. He remembers how beautiful he sees her, the way she walks, the way she lifts her head when she laughs. How easily they’d talked together that night, the touch of her hand on his arm. It could have been there is what he thinks.
He places the jar between the floor joists, nesting it among the dust and the cables and pipes like an egg, a bundle of memories waiting to hatch into the future. Tomorrow he will pack his bags and move to another house a few streets away, and he is reluctant to vanish without a trace. He replaces the floorboard, lays the rug over the top, returns the bed to its original position.
Today, he thinks. He could go and talk to her today. Say excuse me I hope you don’t mind me asking but do you remember that night, that party? Say excuse me but, really, I am actually very much in love with you. He smiles at the impossibility of it, blinks, scratches the back of his hand.
He puts some bread in the toaster, he walks down the stairs and out into the street. There is hardly anyone out yet, except for the art student at number eleven, and the boy on the tricycle, his head down, rattling and racing along the pavement. He looks up at the clear sky, stretching his arms, turning and briefly looking at the closed front door of number twenty-two. He hears the kerchang of the toaster and goes back inside, leaving the door open.
She opens her front door, just a little, just enough, and she hops down her front steps, the young girl from number nineteen, glad to be out of the house and away from the noise of her brothers. The television was boring and strange anyway, it was all people talking and she didn’t understand. She taps her feet on the pavement, listening to the sound her shiny black shoes make against the stone, and then she strides along the pavement with her fingers linked behind her back the way she’s seen her father walk when he’s walking with the other old men. She watches her feet as they spring between the paving slabs, enjoying the bounce and the hop of it, counting each step, stopping when she gets to twenty because that’s as far as she knows.
She looks up, balancing on one foot, and spins around and around and she can see a spiral blur of sandy-coloured houses and blue sky and streaks of red and blue and yellow from people’s curtains and all the colours spin round and when she stops suddenly it all carries on spinning for a moment and she feels dizzy. She sees a man sitting on his garden wall, a young man, and he is looking at her and smiling. She looks away quickly, and counts twenty steps back towards her house, bounce bounce, not stepping on the cracks.
The man sitting on his wall, outside number eleven, he is drawing a picture of the street. He has pens and pencils and rulers and erasers and a compass and a protractor, and he is drawing a very detailed picture of the row of houses opposite, trying to get the correct perspectives and elevations, trying to capture all of the architectural details.
That is what he wants to get onto the page, all the architectural details. For now there are just a few lines, faintly etched and erased and re-etched, between a scattering of dots and noted numbers and angles. He wants to do a good job of this today. He’s been told that his drawing is weak and that he must improve it, and he doesn’t want to lose his place on the course so he is trying very hard. He begins to measure the widths of the houses, squinting along the length of his arm, looking for the correct proportions. These houses are very different from the houses in his street, of course. The colour, the shape, the way they are all joined into one another, the height of them, it is all different from his village at home. But he likes them, there is a pride to see in these houses, in their age and in their grandeur. He knows that they were built over a hundred years ago, and that they were built for the owners of the textile factories, houses big enough to have servants squeezed into the attics and cellars, houses rich enough to have stained glass over the doors and sculpted figure heads amongst the eaves. He wonders about the people who lived in these houses first, the rich gentlemen and their elegant wives, their cooks and butlers and footmen, what they would say if they could see their houses now, shunted into the poor part of town, broken up into apartments and bedsits, their gardens mostly unkept, their paintwork mostly crumbling.
But still he thinks, even if they are not what they were they are still good houses, in a good street with wide pavements and plenty of trees for shade and life. He measures the distances between the ridges and the eaves, calculating the angles, and as he looks towards the far end of the street he notices that the hop-skipping girl is standing right behind him and is looking at his skeletal drawing.
He looks at her. She looks at the paper, at him, and back at the paper.
It is the street he says, and he waves a hand at the row of houses opposite, I am drawing your marvellous street, and she giggles because his accent makes marvellous rhyme with jealous. Where are the windows she says, in a very still and quiet voice, and she rubs her finger on the page.
Not yet he says, smiling at her, first I draw the walls and roofs and then I will draw the windows and doors and all the things. She looks at him, and at the page, and across the street. Where is the dog she says in the same voice, and she moves her finger across the page to where she thinks the dog should be.
Okay he says, I will put the dog in for you. But only after the windows he says, and he smiles at her. She looks at him, she turns around and skips across the road.
He watches her for a moment, he takes a pencil and sketches in the lines of the rooftop, the ground, the eaves, carefully, hesitantly, joining the marks of the measurements he has made. He looks from the page to the building, he sighs and he pulls at the loose skin around the corners of his forehead, it is very difficult he is thinking.
Upstairs at number twenty, the old man stands by the window, waiting for the kettle to boil, watching the twin brothers creeping into the garden of number seventeen, raised up on the fronts of their feet like a couple of Inspector Clouseaus.
The old man pushes his fingers into the thick white strands of his hair, he watches.
The boys are carrying elaborate waterguns, bright coloured plastic, blue cylinders and pink pressure pumps, green barrels and triggers, and they move to stand either side of the open front-room window, pressing flat against the wall like miniature sentries in a Swiss clocktower.
The kettle behind him sighs its way to a boil, and he watches the boys plunge their heads and arms into the billow of the drifting net curtain, their thin high voices echoing up to his window.
They re-emerge, they turn and they run from the garden, waving their guns like cowboys and indians, their faces hysterical with laughter and excitement and fear. A young man with wet hair appears at the window, shouting, wiping his face with the palm of his hand.
The old man laughs quietly. He likes the twins, they’re funny, they remind him of his great-nephew, the same energy, the same cheek. He laughs again, and the breath whistles in the top of his lungs, the pain is suddenly there again, like cotton thread being yanked through his airways, the whistling getting louder, the hot red streaks beginning to splinter across his vision and he leans against the worktop, gulping for oxygen, jaw flapping, a fish drowning in air.
The kettle shrieks to a boil. The lid rattles with the pressure of the steam.
Downstairs, the man with the carefully trimmed moustache is getting dressed. He is standing in front of a mirror, fastening the top button of a crisp white shirt. He combs his thin black hair, straight down at the back, straight down at the sides, either side of a straight central parting on the top. He puts the comb back in its plastic wallet and takes a bowtie from the open leather suitcase on his table, where he keeps all his clothes. He loops it around his collar, lifting his head to tie the knot, adjusting it, tweaking at the corners until he gets it straight.
Upstairs, the old man clutches at his throat, head tipped back, mouth gaping, silent, staring at the ceiling like a tourist in the Sistine Chapel.
Chapter 9 (#ulink_267b7817-e20d-5361-8028-8a2c5a3519b7)
It took me a long time to get to sleep that night.
The rain was still spattering against the window, and there was a loud fall of water from a broken gutter onto the concrete below.
I blocked my ears with the bedcovers, I breathed slowly and deeply, I counted to a hundred, I counted to five hundred.
I gave up eventually, and put the light on, and sat up in bed to read.
But I couldn’t concentrate, I kept thinking about that day, that moment, the afternoon.
About what happened and why there are so many names I can’t remember.
About whether I knew the names in the first place.
Whenever I tried to read my book the images kept returning, small moments from that day and I don’t understand why I can’t leave it alone.
It’s a strange feeling, almost like a guilty feeling, almost like I feel responsible.
I thought about going back up to my room that morning, after a shower and a mouthful of breakfast.
Swinging the window open, and the flood of fresh summer air that had come sweeping in, the sweetness of a rolling wind that was still clean from the countryside.
Seeing the guy from over the road poking his head through an attic skylight and tipping a bucket of water over some kids in their front garden.
I tried to remember his name, and all I could remember was the ring through his eyebrow, the way he used to smack the palm of one hand with the back of the other.
I remembered how hard it was to pack, how I spent the morning rearranging boxes and bags and rewriting lists.
I hadn’t known what I was going to need, what I should throw away or leave behind, what I should give to someone for safekeeping.
I still hadn’t known where I was going.
I remembered phoning the landlord and asking for another week, and panicking when he said people were due to move in the next evening.
I remembered looking at my overflowing room, and the empty boxes, and not knowing where to begin.
I thought about how I’d gone and stood in Simon’s room for a while, looking at the sunlight brightening and fading on the ceiling.
Thinking about him leaving the week before, and how bare his room was now.
The unfaded squares on the wall where his posters had been.
The naked mattress on the floor, a curve in the middle where the springs had begun to fail.
And the things he’d left behind, unable to fit them into the boxes he’d squeezed into his dad’s car.
Coathangers in the wardrobe that rattled like skeletons when I stood on the loose floorboards.
A muted noticeboard on the desk, pimpled with drawing pins.
A paper lightshade he’d taken down but left behind, folded on the floor like a deflated accordion.
The room had a hardness in it without his things there, an emptiness that made me want to close the door, leave a do not disturb sign outside, let the dust settle.
I remembered going to the shops to buy binbags, and saying hello to the boy at number eighteen.
He was on his doorstep, reading, and I caught his eye and he smiled so I said hello.
I think it was the only time I ever spoke to him.
He said how are you doing, how’s the packing going, he said it with a little laugh, as though it was a joke.
Oh I said, fine I said, and I wondered how he knew that’s what I was doing.
There was a silence, and we looked at each other, and I noticed he was blinking a lot and I thought he looked nervous.
He said, last day of summer, everyone’s packing aren’t they, and he did the little laugh again, and I said well you know, all good things come to an end and he said yes.
I said well I’d better get to the shop, I’ll see you around, yes he said, yes, okay, well, see you then.
And he held up his hand, a wave like half a surrender, and by the time I walked back he had gone.
I remembered going back to my room and trying to imagine it being like Simon’s.
I took a poster off the wall to see how much the sunlight had faded the paint in the time I’d been there.
I took all my clothes out of the wardrobe and made the coathangers rattle.
I couldn’t picture the room being as changed and empty as Simon’s already was.
I wanted to leave a note for the next tenant, leave a trace of myself behind, I wanted to be able to go back years later and find a plaque with my name on it screwed to the wall.
I thought about all this, lying in bed listening to the rain, looking at the room I sleep in now, another room in another city.
I looked at the objects that make it my room, the calendar on the wall, the colour of the curtains, the photographs.
I thought about all the other people who’ve slept in this room before me, about what traces they’ve left behind.
It took me a long time to get to sleep.
And when I woke up in the morning the room felt different, haunted, and I had to get out of bed quickly.
It had stopped raining, finally, but the street outside was still wet, swathes of dirty water across the road, sodden pages of newsprint glued to the pavement like transfers.
Perhaps the words will soak into the stone I thought, yesterday’s stories imprinted like cave paintings, like a tattoo.
I left early for work, I didn’t want to stay in my flat after the previous day.
I couldn’t face cleaning up the broken plates or reading those leaflets again.
I got dressed and slipped out of the door without any breakfast, down the steps and past the back door of the shop downstairs.
There was a cold wind, but it was a dry wind and it felt good on my skin and I sucked big mouthfuls of it into my lungs.
There was a girl with a striped overall standing by the back door of the shop, smoking, I’ve seen her there before.
She smiled and said hello and I was surprised so I think I only nodded.
I walked along the main road, the wind blowing across my face, the traffic steaming slowly past me in fits and starts and stops.
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Jon McGregor
WINNER OF THE BETTY TRASK AWARDWINNER OF THE SOMERSET MAUGHAM AWARDLONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZEOn a street in a town in the North of England, ordinary people are going through the motions of their everyday existence – street cricket, barbecues, painting windows… A young man is in love with a neighbour who does not even know his name. An old couple make their way up to the nearby bus stop. But then a terrible event shatters the quiet of the early summer evening. That this remarkable and horrific event is only poignant to those who saw it, not even meriting a mention on the local news, means that those who witness it will be altered for ever.Jon McGregor's first novel brilliantly evokes the histories and lives of the people in the street to build up an unforgettable human panorama. Breathtakingly original, humane and moving, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things is an astonishing debut.
If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things
Jon McGregor
Copyright (#ud07d367e-0d14-500c-8c1d-4ed3d2a305a1)
4th Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.4thEstate.co.uk (http://www.4thEstate.co.uk)
First published by Bloomsbury in 2002
This eBook published by 4th Estate in 2017
Copyright © 2002 by Jon McGregor
Cover image © Shutterstock
Jon McGregor asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins
Source ISBN: 9780008218690
Ebook Edition © January 2017 ISBN: 9780008218706
Version: 2016-12-07
To Alice
Contents
Cover (#u651a90f8-901f-572f-ba50-bdead6fa4b86)
Title Page (#u582e6bcf-c480-50fd-90c3-4570926b5aea)
Copyright
Dedication (#ud724d227-4bdf-52ca-bc98-85c567f774e2)
Chapter 1 (#ulink_11b9762b-3d2c-5dc3-8e4b-ac94374a20be)
Chapter 2 (#ulink_bcffd8a6-5cb3-529c-b35d-b5ae1cb061fb)
Chapter 3 (#ulink_1ba40c7b-16ea-5cea-8f8c-f18ef7621501)
Chapter 4 (#ulink_8d613eb3-f356-591e-b12b-cfbca0845695)
Chapter 5 (#ulink_d468d4d6-f8b7-577f-b94a-351ab5716617)
Chapter 6 (#ulink_00d02ac0-0f04-5f16-bf47-79a0a84814ee)
Chapter 7 (#ulink_9bce60e8-624b-5ac5-b948-ebb2a18bf451)
Chapter 8 (#ulink_029d51e6-8fd3-5b8b-84a8-271ff14d8d93)
Chapter 9 (#ulink_c8a3b656-7c5c-59f4-8217-56a93b009e82)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Read an exclusive extract from Jon McGregor’s new novel, Reservoir 13
By the Same Author
A Note on the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher
Chapter 1 (#ulink_b7e5abe6-35b6-5eb6-a4bb-ae1630badf31)
If you listen, you can hear it.
The city, it sings.
If you stand quietly, at the foot of a garden, in the middle of a street, on the roof of a house.
It’s clearest at night, when the sound cuts more sharply across the surface of things, when the song reaches out to a place inside you.
It’s a wordless song, for the most, but it’s a song all the same, and nobody hearing it could doubt what it sings. And the song sings the loudest when you pick out each note.
The low soothing hum of air-conditioners, fanning out the heat and the smells of shops and cafes and offices across the city, winding up and winding down, long breaths layered upon each other, a lullaby hum for tired streets.
The rush of traffic still cutting across flyovers, even in the dark hours a constant crush of sound, tyres rolling across tarmac and engines rumbling, loose drains and manhole covers clack-clacking like cast-iron castanets.
Road-menders mending, choosing the hours of least interruption, rupturing the cold night air with drills and jack-hammers and pneumatic pumps, hard-sweating beneath the fizzing hiss of floodlights, shouting to each other like drummers in rock bands calling out rhythms, pasting new skin on the veins of the city.
Restless machines in workshops and factories with endless shifts, turning and pumping and steaming and sparking, pressing and rolling and weaving and printing, the hard crash and ring and clatter lifting out of echo-high buildings and sifting into the night, an unaudited product beside the paper and cloth and steel and bread, the packed and the bound and the made.
Lorries reversing, right round the arc of industrialparks, it seems every lorry in town is reversing, backing through gateways, easing up ramps, shrill-calling their presence while forklift trucks gas and prang around them, heaping and stacking and loading.
And all the alarms, calling for help, each district and quarter, each street and estate, each every way you turn has alarms going off, coming on, going off, coming on, a hammered ring like a lightning drum-roll, like a mesmeric bell-toll, the false and the real as loud as each other, crying their needs to the night like an understaffed orphanage, babies waawaa-ing in darkened wards.
Sung sirens, sliding through the streets, streaking blue light from distress to distress, the slow wail weaving urgency through the darkest of the dark hours, a lament lifted high, held above the rooftops and fading away, lifted high, flashing past, fading away.
And all these things sing constant, the machines and the sirens, the cars blurting hey and rumbling all headlong, the hoots and the shouts and the hums and the crackles, all come together and rouse like a choir, sinking and rising with the turn of the wind, the counter and solo, the harmony humming expecting more voices.
So listen.
Listen, and there is more to hear.
The rattle of a dustbin lid knocked to the floor.
The scrawl and scratch of two hackle-raised cats.
The sudden thundercrash of bottles emptied into crates.
The slam-slam of car doors, the changing of gears, the hobbled clip-clop of a slow walk home.
The rippled roll of shutters pulled down on late-night cafes, a crackled voice crying street names for taxis, a loud scream that lingers and cracks into laughter, a bang that might just be an old car backfiring, a callbox calling out for an answer, a treeful of birds tricked into morning, a whistle and a shout and a broken glass, a blare of soft music and a blam of hard beats, a barking and yelling and singing and crying and it all swells up all the rumbles and crashes and bangings and slams, all the noise and the rush and the non-stop wonder of the song of the city you can hear if you listen the song
and it stops
in some rare and sacred dead time, sandwiched between the late sleepers and the early risers, there is a miracle of silence.
Everything has stopped.
And silence drops down from out of the night, into this city, the briefest of silences, like a falter between heartbeats, like a darkness between blinks. Secretly, there is always this moment, an unexpected pause, a hesitation as one day is left behind and a new one begins.
A catch of breath as gasometer lungs begin slow exhalations.
A ring of tinnitus as thermostats interrupt air-conditioning fans.
These moments are there, always, but they are rarely noticed and they rarely last longer than a flicker of thought.
We are in that moment now, there is silence and the whole city is still.
The old tall-windowed mills, staggered across the skyline, they are silent, they are keeping their ghosts and their thoughts to themselves.
The smoked-glass offices, slung low to the ground, they are still, they are blankly reflecting the haze and shine of the night. Soon, they will resume their business, their coy whispers of ones and zeroes across networks of threaded glass, but now, for a moment, they are hushed. The buses in the depot, waiting for a new day, they are quiet, their metalwork easing and shrinking into place, settling and cooling after eighteen hours of heat and noise, eighteen hours of criss-crossing the city like wool on a loom.
And the clubs in the centre, they are empty, the dancefloors sticky and sore from a night’s pounding, the lights still turning and blinking, lost shoes and wallets and keys gathered in heaps.
And the night-fishers strung out along the canal, feeling the sing of their lines in the water, although they are within yards of each other they are saying nothing, watching luminous floats hang in the night like bottled fireflies, waiting for the dip and strike which will bring a centre to their time here, waiting for the quietness and calm they have come here to find.
Even the traffic scattered through these streets: the taxis and the cleaners, the shift-workers and the delivery drivers, even they are held still in this moment, trapped by traffic lights which synchronise red as the system cycles from old day to new, hundreds of feet resting on accelerators, hundreds of pairs of eyes hanging on the lights, all waiting for the amber, all waiting for the green.
The whole city has stopped.
And this is a pause worth savouring, because the world will soon be complicated again.
It’s the briefest of pauses, with not time enough to even turn full circle and look at all the lights this city throws out to the sky, and it’s a pause which is easily broken. A slamming door, a car alarm, a thin drift of music from half a mile away, and already the city is moving on, already tomorrow is here.
The music is coming from a curryhouse near the football ground, careering out of speakers placed outside to attract extra custom. The restaurant is almost empty, a bhindi masala in one corner, a special korma in the other, and the carpark is deserted except for a young couple standing with their arms around each other’s waists. They’ve not been a couple long, a few days perhaps, or a week, and they are both still excited and nervous with desire and possibility. They’ve come here to dance, drawn sideways from their route home by the music and by bravado, and now they are hesitating, unsure of how to begin, unfamiliar with the steps, embarrassed.
But they do begin, and as the first smudges of light seep into the sky from the east, from the far side of the city and in towards these streets, they hold their heads high and their backs straight and step together in time to the slide and wheel of the music. They dance with a style more suited to the ballroom than to the bollywood movies the music comes from, but they dance all the same, hips swinging, waists touching, eyes fixed on eyes. The waiters have come across to the window, they are laughing, they are calling uncle uncle to the man in the kitchen who is finally beginning to clean up after a long night. They dance, and he steps out of the door to watch, wiping his hands on his apron, licking the weary tips of his fingers, pulling at his long beard. They dance, and he smiles and nods and thinks of his wife sleeping at home, and thinks of when they were young and might still have done something like this.
Elsewhere, across the city, the day is beginning with a rush and a shout, the fast whine of office hoovers, the locked slam of lorry doors, the hurried clocking on of the early shifts.
But here, as the dawn sneaks up on the last day of summer, and as a man with tired hands watches a young couple dance in the carpark of his restaurant, there are only these: sparkling eyes, smudged lipstick, fading starlight, the crunching of feet on gravel, laughter, and a slow walk home.
He was the first to move, the boy from number eighteen.
He was up and across the street before anyone had blinked, before anyone had made a sound.
It was as if he knew what he had to do, as if he’d been waiting for the opportunity.
He moved off the doorstep like a loaded sprinter, and by the time I turned to see who it was he was there.
He was there and then it was over, and it was so sudden that I felt as though a camera flash had exploded in my face.
Everything went white, ghostly, like old news footage, faded and stained.
I couldn’t understand what was happening, I couldn’t believe what was happening.
I sat there, in the warm afternoon of the last day of summer, and I couldn’t work out what I was seeing.
I watched him moving across the street, the boy from number eighteen, and I tried to understand.
I don’t remember seeing it, not the moment itself, I remember strange details, peripheral images, small things that happened away from the blinded centre.
I remember the girl next to me dropping her can of beer and swaying backwards, as though from a shockwave.
I can picture the can hitting the ground, the weight of it crushing into the grass, the way it tipped to one side but stayed upright, like a half-fallen telegraph pole in a storm.
I can see a slow-motion image of the beer, frothing from the top of the can, a coil of it rising up like smoke, hanging in the light a moment before spreading flat into the grass and spraying across my lap.
I don’t know where that comes from.
I don’t know how I could possibly have seen these details.
The fizz of the beer popping into sparkles of air.
Blades of grass straightening themselves as the liquid soaks into the soil, the damp patch on my skirt shrinking and fading and drying in the sun.
The brightness of the light.
There was a woman leaning out of a high window, shaking a blanket.
There were some boys over the road having a barbecue, pushing a knife into the meat to see if it was cooked.
There was a man with a long beard, up a ladder at number twenty-five, painting his windowframes, he’d been there all day and he’d almost finished.
Each frame was gleaming wetly in the sun, a beautiful pale blue like the first faint colour of dawn and it had been nice to watch the slow thoroughness of his work.
There was a boy in the next-door garden, cleaning his trainers with a nailbrush and a bowl of soapy water.
I can see all these moments as though they were cast in stone, small moments captured and enlarged by the context, like figures in a Pompeii exhibition.
The woman with the blanket, interrupted mid-swing, her attention snatched away, the blanket losing momentum and flapping gently against the wall.
Her arms still stretched out, her lips still pursed against the billowing dust.
The blanket hanging down towards the ground, like a semaphore.
Somebody said oh my God.
A boy on a red tricycle rode into a tree.
His feet slipped off the pedals and got caught under the wheels, tugging him from his seat and down towards the ground.
I can see him, falling sideways, his leg about to scrape the concrete, his head about to hit the tree, his tricycle tipping onto two wheels and his attention clamped into the road.
His head kept turning as he fell, and when he hit the ground, he could only lie there, watching, like everyone else.
He can barely have been three years old, I wanted to run to him and cover his eyes but I couldn’t move so he kept on looking.
A man who’d been washing his car lifted both his hands to the top of his head, squeezing them into fists.
He was still holding a sponge, water crushing out of it and down his back but he didn’t move.
Somebody said oh shit oh shit oh shit.
But mostly there was this moment of absolute silence. Absolute stillness.
It can’t actually have been like that of course, there must still have been music playing, and traffic passing along the main road, but that’s the way I remember it, with this single weighted pause, the whole street frozen in a tableau of gaping mouths.
And the boy from number eighteen, moving through the locked moment like a blessing.
It seemed, or at least it seems now, that everything else was motionless.
The beercan caught between the hand and the ground.
The blanket not quite touching the wall.
The boy with the tricycle a flinch away from the tree.
A gasp in my throat, held back, like the air in the pinched neck of a balloon.
And it all seemed wrong somehow, unreal, unconnected to the sort of day it had been.
An uneventful day, slow and warm and quiet, people talking on their front steps, children playing, music, a barbecue.
I’d been woken when it first got light by the slamming of taxi doors, people I knew at number seventeen coming back from a long night out and trailing slowly down the street.
I hadn’t been able to get back to sleep, I’d stayed in bed and watched the sun brightening into the room, listened to the kids running outside, the familiar rattle of the boy’s tricycle.
Later, I’d got up and had breakfast and tried to start packing, I’d sat on the front step and drank tea and read magazines.
I’d gone to the shop and talked briefly to the boy at number eighteen, he was awkward and shy and it didn’t make sense that he would be the one to move so instantly across the street.
It rained, towards the end of the afternoon, suddenly and heavily, but that was all, there was nothing else unusual or unexpected about the day.
And somehow it seems wrong that there wasn’t a buildup, a feeling in the air, a premonition or a warning or a clue.
I wonder if there was, actually, if there was something I missed because I wasn’t paying attention.
The silence didn’t last long, people started rushing out into the street, shouting, flinging open windows and doors.
A woman from down the road ran out towards them and stopped halfway, turning back, shaking her hands in front of her face.
The man up the ladder made a call on his mobile before climbing down and leaving the last frame half-painted.
There were people I didn’t even recognise coming out of their houses to join the others.
But me and the other girl, Sarah, we just sat there, staring, holding our mouths open.
If we’d been closer, or younger, we might have held hands, tightly, but we didn’t.
I think she picked up her beer and drank a little more, and I think I drank as well.
I can’t remember, all I can remember is staring at the curtain of legs in the street, trying to see through.
Trying not to see through.
After a few minutes, the noise in the street seemed to quieten again.
The knot of people in the street loosened, turned aside.
People were looking to the main road, looking at their watches, waiting.
I remember noticing that there was still music coming out of half a dozen windows along the street, and then noticing that the songs were being silenced, one by one, like the lights going out at the end of The Waltons.
I remember a smell of burning, and seeing that the boys opposite had left their meat on the barbecue.
I could see the smoke starting to twist upwards.
I could see faces at windows.
I could see people glancing up, looking at the one door which was still closed.
Waiting for it to open, hoping that it might not.
I don’t understand why it seems so fresh in my mind, even now, three years later and a few hundred miles away.
I think about it, and I can’t even remember people’s names.
I just remember sitting there, those moments of waiting, murmurous and tense.
People striding to the end of the street, looking up and down the main road, stretching to see round the corner.
Turning back to the others and raising their hands.
The old man from number twenty-five, the brush in his hand, dribbling a trail of pale blue paint, walking towards the closed door.
Rubbing his bearded cheeks with the palm of his hand.
Knocking.
The distant careen of a siren, the man knocking at the door.
Chapter 2 (#ulink_a65c0c1f-13fd-5bdd-a496-f17245822e77)
A taxi drifts into the end of the street, its engine clicketing loudly as the doors open and half a dozen young people spill brightly out onto the pavement.
There is a pause; payment is made, the doors are slammed shut, and the taxi moves away, out of sight. And they stand there for a moment, blinking and grinning and waiting uncertainly, a tall thin girl with a short short skirt and eyes smudged with glitter, a boy with beige slacks and a ring through his eyebrow, a girl with enormous trainers and army trousers and her hair dyed pink and they are walking down the street, slowly, blissfully, their heads full of music and light, their nervous systems over-stimulated by hormones and chemicals and the exhilaration of the night.
A very short girl wearing nothing but shorts and a bra, her toenails painted the same violets and pinks and greens as her fingernails, she claps her hands, she looks at the sanded bare windowsills of number twenty-five, she says look they look naked, she looks at the tins of pale blue paint, the blue spilling down the side of the tin, she looks at the brushes and the scrapers and she says it’s a nice colour it’s going to look nice but nobody’s listening.
A boy wearing an almost clean white shirt, a tie looped loosely around his neck, he jumps up onto the garden wall of number nineteen, he balances on one leg, he says shush shush can you hear that and when the others stop and say what he says nothing, can you hear nothing it’s nice and he topples groundwards hoping the boy with the beige slacks and the pierced eyebrow can catch him.
On the other side of the street, in an upstairs bedroom at number twenty-two, a girl wakes up and hears someone talking about the quietness of the morning. She listens to the loud voice, it sounds familiar, she sits up in bed and puts her glasses on and looks at the people in the street. She knows them, some of them live at number seventeen, she wonders where they’ve been as she takes off her glasses and gets back into bed.
In the downstairs flat of number twenty, an old man with thinning hair and a carefully trimmed moustache is lying awake, listening to the noises outside. His eyes are open, frowning, focusing on what he can hear. He is listening for tell-tale signs, the crisp sound of a can being crumpled underfoot, the tinkle of a dropped bottle. His eyes sweep from side to side, concentrating, searching. But he doesn’t hear anything, and as the voices fade he closes his eyes again, turning face-down into the bed, away from the light, hoping for a little more sleep before the day begins.
Outside, the boy with the white shirt opens the door of number seventeen and the others follow him inside, whirling slowly around, gathering the objects they need to keep them safe, cartons of fruit juice and bottles of coke, bars of chocolate and tubes of crisps, tapes, CDs, cushions, duvets, cigarette papers, cigarettes, candles and burners and matches and drugs. And in the back bedroom they are settling down and they are talking, the tall thin girl with glitter round her eyes says don’t be so fucking daft man it’d go all over the floor and down your legs and that, and she giggles and turns to reach for a drink and as her face catches the candle-light her skin sparkles like shattered glass in the sun.
In the front first-floor bedroom of number nineteen a woman wakes suddenly. She looks at the clock, she looks at her sleeping husband, she wonders why she has woken. There is no noise from the street, the children are quiet. She eases softly out of bed, her bladder suddenly straining and full, she stands and she opens the door slowly enough for it not to squeak. On the way to the bathroom, she looks into the children’s bedroom and checks on each one of them, she crouches at the lower bunks and stretches up to the top one. She looks with sleepy love at the three of them, she watches their young bodies swelling and shrinking through her barely opened eyes, she holds her hand close to their faces to feel the warm give and suck of their breath. She murmurs a brief prayer for them and closes the door gently, soft-padding to the toilet, sitting and relieving herself and watching the shadows of pigeons flap across the bathroom wall.
The short girl with the painted toenails, next door, she says oh but did you see that guy on the balcony, he was nice, no he was special and she savours the word like a strawberry, you know she says, the one on the balcony, the one who was speeding and kept leaning right over, and they all know exactly who she means, he’s in the same place most weeks, pounding out the rhythm like a panelbeater, fists crashing down into the air, sweat splashing from his polished head.
She says once I was there and he got so carried away that he hung from the balcony by his legs, he had his feet hooked under the rail, and she remembers the way his face had stretched into a furious O, going come on let’s have some and she remembers his fists still flailing across the void like an astronaut lost in orbit.
A girl sleeps in the back bedroom of number eleven, her hair is pushed out of her eyes by a hairband, her mouth is wide open, the room is warm and beginning to lighten. Bird shadows pass quickly across her face but she does not wake.
A couple in their early thirties sleep in the attic flat of number twenty-one, wrapped loosely in a thin red blanket, he is snoring and she is turned away from him, there is a television on in the corner with the sound turned down, shadows pass through the room but the couple do not wake.
In the back bedroom of number seventeen, the boy with the white shirt and the tie says it was definitely a girl, she didn’t have an Adam’s apple, I swear, it was a girl definitely, and everyone laughs at him and he looks around the room and joins in the laughter and somebody passes him a long cigarette.
The boy with the wide trousers is quiet, he’s looking at the girl next to him, a beautifully unslim girl with dark curls of hair falling down over a red velvet dress, he’s looking at the laces and straps and buckles and zips of her complicated footwear and he looks up at her and says so how long does it take you to get those boots off then? She looks at him, this girl, with lips as red as the fire inside a chilli, she looks at the tight spread of him across the bed and she says
I don’t know I’ve never taken them off myself
and she smiles at the sharpness of his intake of breath, she watches his eyes trickle down from her face and roll down the rich geometry of her body.
And everyone else keeps talking, compulsively, talking across each other, talking about the tunes they heard and the people they saw and the next place they want to go. The boy with the white shirt and the tie keeps saying it was definitely a girl, and then he stuffs a pipe full of fresh green herb and the room quietens in anticipation, the conversation dropping, each of them suddenly feeling their minds too frantic, their bodies too tense, and they suck on the sweet smoke in turn, holding the pillow of it in their lungs, closing their eyes, stilling their voices.
And they think about daytime things for a moment, about rolling hills, or beaches, or playing football, or whatever it is they’ve learnt to think about at these times, and they breathe slowly and move for a moment into a kind of waking sleep. And if someone were to look through the window now, to walk into the backyard and press their face against the glass, cupping their hands around their eyes like a pair of binoculars, that person would see what looked like a roomful of people gathered together in silent prayer, and they would wonder who such a vigil might be for.
Outside, a taxi drives slowly down the street, the driver peering from the window, checking house numbers. He gets as far as number twenty-eight, and then there are no more numbers. He hesitates a moment before driving away, the sound of the car fading behind him like a trail of dust.
And now they are quiet, the girl with the army trousers trying to find a picture on the television, the boy with the pierced eyebrow holding a lighter beneath the plastic lid of a tube of crisps, a look of concentration in his eyes, waiting, watching the plastic soften.
The girl with the boots says I’m going home, I want to go home now.
Do you want to come with me she says to the boy with the wide trousers, walk me home she says, and her voice is thin and tired.
The boy with the shirt and tie is lying down on the floor, draping one arm across the tall girl who is still chewing gum and staring at the ceiling, dragging a duvet halfway across them both.
The short girl is curled up in a ball in the middle of the bed, waiting for the girl with the army trousers to come and keep her warm.
The boy with the pierced eyebrow lifts the lid to his mouth and blows, and a bubble of hot plastic shoots halfway across the room, flashing into place like a miracle, holding its long airship shape for a fraction of a second and then floating gently down towards the floor.
The girl with the boots offers her hand to the boy with the wide trousers, pulls him to his feet and kisses his forehead. Take me home she says and they drift slowly through the door.
The girl with the army trousers closes her eyes and collapses into the bed, adjusting herself gradually against the outline of the other girl’s body, wrapping around her like a nutshell.
In the first-floor flat of number eighteen, a young man sits up in bed, it’s early but he feels very awake, he looks around at the mess of his room and he thinks of all the things he wants to do today, needs to do. Sorting, packing, tidying, arranging. He rubs at his dry eyes with the tips of his fingers, he gets out of bed and walks across to the window. He sees two people in the middle of the road, he recognises the girl from number twenty-seven, he doesn’t recognise the boy and he wonders who he is. He picks up a camera and takes photographs of the morning, the two people in the street, the sunlight, the closed curtains of the windows opposite, he puts down the camera and makes notes in a small book, he writes the date, he details the things he has just photographed.
The young couple in the street, dancing, their arms curled gracefully around one another, the music from the restaurant carpark still in their heads, disappearing into her house, leaving the front door open, the street empty and quiet.
A cat, waiting on a doorstep.
Pigeons, dropping onto chimneytops.
Chapter 3 (#ulink_a2e854fd-9017-5e62-ade3-3814ce187ae9)
I’d been thinking about it when I called Sarah, the girl sitting next to me that day, I realised it had been a while since we’d spoken and it was probably my turn to call.
I said hi I just fancied a chat I wondered what you were up to and she said oh hi it’s been ages hasn’t it.
All our conversations seem to start like this now.
Once a month, maybe less, one of us will call the other and we’ll say oh hi it’s been ages we should try and meet up, and a plan will be made, and cancelled, or not quite made at all.
We’re not that far apart, maybe half an hour on the tube, but it’s been months since we’ve seen each other and every month it seems to matter less.
And so I sat in my room, that evening, and we talked about the usual things, about new jobs and plans for new jobs, about people we both knew and people we were meeting, about dates and possible dates.
I looked out of my open window, across the endless city, and I imagined her sitting by her window, looking in this direction, the telephone a shortcut through all those streets.
I wondered what her room looked like, what she could see from it.
She said so who have you spoken to lately, have you heard from Simon, and I said no not for a long time.
I thought about all the time we spent together, the three of us, the long days of that last summer in the house and I wondered how it had become so hard to keep in touch.
I remembered the promises we’d made to each other, me and Sarah and Simon, and I wondered if I’d been naive to think we could keep them.
I remembered how easily we used to talk, endlessly, making plans, deciding where we’d be in one and two and three years’ time, and I don’t remember mentioning this.
I had the appointment card on the table, the letter with the confirmation of results, and all I wanted to do was tell her about it, talk it over, like we would have done before.
I wanted to talk about why it was making me so scared, why there was a breathless panic fluttering up into my throat.
Sarah you’re not going to believe this, I wanted to say, or Sarah can I tell you something?
I wanted her to say oh calm down why don’t you, the way she did when I used to get worked up about deadlines and exams.
To say look no one’s dying here, we’re not talking about open-heart surgery, it’s normal, it’s a thing that happens.
I wanted her to give me some perspective, to say things out loud and make them seem a little more ordinary.
But I didn’t say anything, I just said oh I had a postcard from Peru, from someone called Rob, I said I couldn’t remember who he was.
She said you must do, he was that guy from over the road, he tried skating down that hill in the park, don’t you remember?
I smiled and said oh yes, and she said remember how no one went to help him because we were all laughing so much, and I laughed and held my hand to my mouth because it still seemed unfair to find it so funny, the way he went sprawling to the floor, arms flung out for balance, bellyflopping across the tarmac.
I said and remember how he had no skin on his arms for the rest of the summer, just those long grey scabs?
And she said I know I know, laughing, she said I can’t believe you’d forgotten, and I could picture the way she screwed her eyes up when she laughed.
We talked about other people, saying do you remember when, and how funny was that, and I wonder what happened to.
We talked about the medicine girl next door, the boy in Rob’s house who thought he could play the guitar, the good-looking boy down the road with the sketchpad.
We talked about the people at number seventeen, Alison who got her tongue pierced, and Chris, and the boy with the ring in his eyebrow but we couldn’t remember his name.
I tried to remember what it was like to be near so many people who knew me.
She said what’s Rob doing in Peru anyway, and I said I don’t know I think he’s saving the children or something.
Do you think he’s taken his skateboard she said, and I laughed and then remembered the way his hair got in his eyes when he was trying to pull off tricks.
The way his jeans always got scuffed under the heels of his trainers.
I thought about him being all those thousands of miles away, and I wondered how long the postcard had taken to reach me.
I read it again, looking at the long looping letters, trying to imagine the slow slur of his voice.
Things are going massively here it said, I’m having an ace time.
It said I’m not really homesick, but I’m missing decent cups of tea, it said you could write to me sometime.
I looked at the front of the card, at the pictures of Peru, smiling women in traditional dress, mountains, monkeys in fruit trees.
She said hello are you still there?
I said do you ever think about it, I mean, that last day.
She didn’t say anything for a moment, I heard a television in the background and I wondered where she was, if she was with anyone.
She said I try not to, it’s weird, you know, I’d rather forget about it.
It seems like a long time ago now she said.
I said I know but I can’t get it out of my head.
It keeps coming back I said, just recently, I don’t know why.
She was quiet, and I waited for her to say something.
I straightened the flowers in the vase on the table, pulled out the dead leaves.
I watched the traffic lights changing in the street outside.
She said what I always remember is the way everything carried on afterwards.
There were still buses going past on the main road she said, and some of the people on them turned to look for a moment but some of them didn’t even notice.
I wanted everything to stop she said, even if it was only for a little while.
There was nothing about it on the news she said, I knew there wouldn’t be but it didn’t seem right.
It just kind of happened and passed she said, and then we left and there was nothing to prove it had happened at all.
I said, you know, it’s the noise I can’t forget.
I still have dreams about it sometimes I said.
The way it echoed off the houses, and, oh, it just, I said.
And then we stopped talking and I could hear her breathing.
She said actually can we talk about something else now.
I said yes, sorry, it’s just I’ve been thinking, you know, lately, and she said well it’s a long time ago.
She said so anyway are you seeing anyone at the moment, and we talked about recent possibilities and failures, comparing notes.
And she said look my dinner’s nearly ready I’d better go.
I said oh sorry I didn’t realise, you’re eating late aren’t you and she said oh I do these days and we both said I’ll speak to you soon then bye.
I didn’t say who are you eating with are you eating on your own.
I sat there for a long time, after I put the phone down, the letter and the appointment card on the table, unmentioned.
I don’t know why I didn’t say anything to her about it, I don’t understand how I became fearful and closed off like this.
I sat there, watching the flowers quivering each time a lorry went past, feeling the tremble echo along the bones of my spine.
I saw the moon appearing, low and white over the park by the river.
I remembered the time Simon had called me through to his room, saying look out of the window, a dark night and the moon was bright and crisp away to the left, a thin crescent like a clipped fingernail.
And he’d said no no no but check this out, look over there, look over that way.
Pointing away to the right, to a second moon as bright and crisp as the first.
I’d looked at him, and he’d giggled and said how mad is that.
I’d looked at the two moons, each as clean and thin and new as each other, the same size, like twins of each other.
And I’d swung his window closed, and the reflection of the moon on the right swung away into the room with it and he said oh right yeah I thought it would be something like that.
I remembered this, and I wondered what he’d been doing the last few years, I wondered about all the people I haven’t seen or spoken to properly since then.
All the emails I get these days start with sorry but I’ve been so busy, and I don’t understand how we can be so busy and then have nothing to say to each other.
I read the letter again, and I sat very still, barely breathing, the streetlight striping the darkening room through the blinds.
I took off my shirt and bra and began touching my skin, very slowly, tracing the contours, pressing against the ridges and lines.
Running my fingers across all the marks and scars and spots, as though I could read my blemishes like braille.
I’m not sure what I was looking for.
I think I wanted to find something new, something visibly changed, something I could point to and say this is what it is, this is where it’s beginning.
But I couldn’t find anything.
I pressed the palm of my hand against my chest and tried to count my heartbeat.
It felt faster than it should be, and my skin felt hot, shining red, as though the blood was rushing to the surface and gasping for air.
I sat there for a long time, I fell asleep in the chair and when I woke up in the morning I was late for work.
Chapter 4 (#ulink_56797e27-bfcd-5174-9349-c49e82ec2721)
In the backyard of number nineteen, a woman is hanging out her washing, murmuring a song to herself and squinting against the light. She can see people sleeping in the back room of next door, she is glad they are quiet now, it means perhaps her children will sleep more.
She stoops for a handful of pegs and adjusts her headscarf. She hangs out a row of salwar kameez in different sizes, bright swathes of colour printed on thin fabric, she hangs out shirts, trousers, endless variations of underwear. And when she is done, and the whole yard is heavy with wavering lines of wet bunting, she straightens up and puts her hand to the hollow of her back, curves her face upwards. She interrupts her murmured song and listens to the muffled rumble of the morning. She breathes slowly and deeply, and for now the air smells clean, infused with the bright wetness of clean laundry.
The young man at number eighteen, with the dry eyes, he’s not dressed yet but he’s awake and he’s busy, he’s crouched on the floor, arranging a collection of objects and papers.
A page from a TV guide. An empty cigarette packet. A series of supermarket till receipts, stapled together in chronological sequence. Leaflets advertising bhangra alldayers and techno all-nighters. Train tickets. Death notices cut from local newspapers. An unopened packet of chewing gum.
He lays them all out on the floor, lays them out in size order, rearranges them in date order, blinking quickly. He stands back and looks, and writes out a list of the objects in front of him.
He turns on the television and picks up a polaroid camera. As soon as the screen warms up he takes a photograph of it, scribbling the time and the date on the back of the blank printout, seven a.m., thirty-one, oh eight, ninety-seven.
He lays the polaroid next to the cigarette packet, watching the shapes darken into colour and light. He turns back to the television, blinking, and watches Zoe talking about pop music in a London park, the soft morning light flitting through the trees and lighting up her hair, she says we’ll be having it large and he turns the television off.
Next door, in the bedroom of number twenty, an old man is lying awake beside his sleeping wife, he is holding his cupped palms close to his face and looking at the tiny flecks of blood he’s just coughed out of his lungs. He is fighting to control his breathing without waking his wife and he is looking at the pictures of their nephews and nieces, their great-nephews and greatnieces, propped up on the dressing table. He feels old, and he feels afraid. He listens to the steadiness of his wife’s breathing, and he thinks about the first night they spent together, a smuggled liaison in a seaside hotel nearly sixty years ago. He remembers the pattern on the wallpaper, the luxury of a three-bar electric fire, the view of the hills from the window. He remembers their shyness, standing awkwardly at the foot of the small bed and reaching out very slowly, kissing once, twice, moving uncertainly to hold each other and gradually allowing their curiosity to prevail. He remembers her insisting that the light be kept on until they slept, and that their clothes be folded neatly. And most of all he remembers how wonderfully startled they both were by their eventual intimacy.
He lies still, listening to his wife, waiting for the morning.
In the attic of number twelve, a young man is leaning out of the window, stripped to the waist. He is smoking a cigarette, holding it away to one side and making sure he blows all the smoke out into the air, and he is thinking about the day ahead.
He finishes the cigarette and drops it down into the street, watching it fall, the way it glows brightly as it accelerates towards the ground, the way it bursts into sparks on the pavement below. He turns back into his room, unwrapping a stick of chewing gum from his bedside drawer, taking a wallet from under his pillow and emptying out the cash. He sits crosslegged on the bed, running a flat hand across his forehead and through his thick black hair, looking at the folded notes with a bounce and a jig of excitement. He counts the money, again, smoothing the creases, sorting the fives from the tens, stacking them in ten neat piles of a hundred pounds each. He grins, biting his lip, nodding his head and tucking the notes back into his wallet, the wallet back under his pillow. Today he thinks, today today, and he lies on his back, one hand behind his head, the other hand a fist which he kisses and shakes in the air. He closes his eyes, but he doesn’t sleep.
At number eighteen, the boy with the sore dry eyes pulls a shoebox from a high shelf and sorts through the polaroids inside, he picks out a handful and fans them out on the floor like a poker spread. A picture of a lamp-post covered in marker-pen graffiti, Uz 4 Shaf 4 eva 9T7, Izzy is fit signed who, Lee an me wuz busy like bee, Sian equals slag, and so on and so, the soap opera of the street corner marked out in rain-faded initials and abbreviations.
A picture of a fly-posted garage door, poster layered upon poster, streaks torn through the layers of dates and venues and djs and bands, the top corner peeling off under the weight to reveal bare metal.
Empty drums of vegetable oil piled up outside a curryhouse like tins in a nineteen fifties supermarket.
A traffic jam at night, beaded white lights stringing down the road like christmas decorations, rain splashed on the camera lens.
Dark dribbles of blood in a pub carpark.
He picks up the camera again and carries it through to the bathroom, he takes a picture of himself in the mirror. He blinks, tightly and painfully, laying the camera down and holding the palms of his hands to his eyes, screwing his face up, rocking his head.
The colours in the polaroid wake into the light, his selfportrait taking shape while he searches for eyedrops, his blind hand like an addict in a medicine cabinet, knocking over shampoos and deodorants and razors.
In the back room of number seventeen, the girl with the glitter around her eyes is lying awake, chewing gum, looking at her sleeping friends. She knows she’ll be awake for some time yet, her brain is piled high with powders and pills and the muscles in her legs are still twitching from the dancefloor. She looks at the girls on the bed, the one curled around the other, protectively, she watches their shoulders and breasts rise and fall, shifting gently into position, she thinks about the piercing in the short girl’s tongue and wonders if it’s true what they say. The stereo is still playing, very quietly, she watches the small green lights bubbling up and down with the music, she listens to the singer going doowah doowah, I love you so, oohwoah. She feels the good strong weight of the white-shirted boy’s arm across her chest, she tilts her head forward to kiss it. The music goes doowah doowah I love you so, and she thinks about the two of them. They haven’t spoken about it, they haven’t said what will we do when we leave here, do you want to come with me, let’s work something out, and she knows that this means they will quickly and easily drift apart, into other people’s lives, into other people’s arms in rooms like this. She is surprised that this doesn’t make her feel sad. She listens to the music, she looks around at the things people dropped when they fell asleep or went out of the room, she kisses the boy’s arm again and she feels only a kind of sweet nostalgia. She wonders if you can feel nostalgic for something before it’s in the past, she wonders if perhaps her vocabulary is too small or if her chemical intake has corroded it and the music goes doowoah doowoah.
In the bathroom of number eighteen, a face looks out from the polaroid, wide-eyed, composed. A young man, early twenties, a smooth round face, straight nose, full lips, pale hair losing thickness around the temples, a buckle of skin folded below each eye. It’s a good picture, and in a moment he will date it and place it with the other objects he has collected together on his bedroom floor, a magazine article, a half-finished crossword, a twin-bladed razor.
But for now he has his head tipped up to the ceiling, a capful of solution bathing the dryness of his eyes, one hand gripping the sink until the ache subsides.
It’s light that makes his eyes hurt, mostly, bright or sudden light, and the dust in the air. It’s a rough prickling sensation, like sandpaper pressed up against the skin of his eye, a dryness he can mostly soothe by blinking rapidly, squeezing moisture across the surface.
It’s worse in the city, with all the dust and the dirt, and it’s worse in the summer, with the long bright days, but usually it’s bearable, usually he doesn’t notice and he just keeps blinking away that gritted feeling. And if it gets too much, like it has now, he comes to his bathroom and bathes his eyes, and it’s a relief like finding a spring welling up in the desert.
He puts the eyedrops back into the cabinet, scratching the back of his hand, he picks up the camera and the selfportrait and returns to his bedroom, he wonders what else he might hide away with this collection. And he thinks about the girl at number twenty-two.
In the street, the front door of number thirteen is swinging gradually open, a young boy who can barely reach the doorhandle is peering around the door, his hair is sticking up and he is still wearing his pyjamas. He climbs onto a bright red tricycle which is waiting for him on the front path, he pushes all his weight onto the pedals and he creaks out of his garden and onto the main pavement. He looks back at the still open front door, he looks ahead of him to the main road, he puts his head down and he pedals, slowly at first, bumping and wobbling over loose paving slabs, picking up speed.
A streetcleaner whirrs past, brushes spinning and skidding across the tarmac, grit and glass and paper skipping up into its innards. The driver stares sleepily ahead, sunglasses curled across his face, lips mouthing the words of the song on the radio, I’ll be there for you, when the rain starts to fall. As he passes number nineteen he glances across at a girl sitting on the garden wall, a girl in a red velvet dress wearing very tall boots, she has her face arched up to the sky and a boy in wide trousers is gently kissing the tight curve of her throat. The streetcleaner whirrs away around the corner and the girl takes the boy’s hand and bites his little finger. He makes a noise, a soft noise and his eyes are closed and his stomach is like it was left behind over a humpbacked bridge and she says shall we go now and they both stand.
They hear voices then, shouted voices crashing down from the attic flat of number twenty-one, a woman’s voice shouting no but listen will you, listen to me, it’s not okay is it you shit you weren’t thinking about me were you you just went off out and did what you wanted to do it’s always about what you want isn’t it you selfish fucking wanker and what about me what about me she screams and the woman between the washing in next-door’s backyard stands and wonders how these people manage to shout at one another so much and still walk in the street with a hand in a hand. Shut up says the man’s voice, just shut up, shut up shut up will you please shut the fucking fuck up please? and his voice rises and rises until it sounds almost like the woman’s and it cracks and it breaks.
The girl and the boy outside, they look at each other and they hurry away down the road, and when they turn the corner the street is empty and quiet again.
The street is empty and quiet and still, the light is brightening, shadows hardening, the haze of dawn burning away. The day will soon burn with a particular brightness, hot and lethargic and tense. Later, it will rain, hard, suddenly, and the hot tarmac will steam and shine as water streaks across the surface into the gutters. And windows will be hurriedly closed, and people will stand in doorways, in shocked silences. But now, in this early beginning, it is dry, and the street is beginning to warm, and people sleep, or lie restlessly awake, or make love and sleep again.
Chapter 5 (#ulink_b356d09d-caa6-5d10-824f-d1b019c54a28)
The day after speaking to Sarah I tried telling my mother.
I took the phone into my room, I sat on the floor with my knees pulled up into my chest and I started to dial the number.
I looked at a photograph on the wall, taken that summer, taken a few days before it happened.
Half a dozen of us, huddled together in a front garden, ashtrays and cushions spread across the grass, a speaker mounted in the front-room window, a beanbag spilling its beans across the pavement.
It’s a photo that makes us look young, it makes all of us look very young.
Our faces taut and shining, grinning awkwardly, squinting into the sunlight, everyone’s arms around everyone else.
Waving cans of beer as though they were novelties.
Looking like we thought everything was going to last forever.
I put the phone down before it started ringing, and I looked at the other pictures.
The photo of Simon must have been taken the same day, the day he left.
He’s sat in the front passenger seat of his dad’s car, window wound down, waving.
His dad’s at the back of the car, leaning all his weight on the boot, trying to get it closed against three years’ worth of possessions.
Against duvets and pillows, a stereo, a television, books and magazines and folders full of notes.
Against plates, saucepans, cutlery, a shoebox full of halffinished condiments, a food processor with the attachments missing.
A box of CDs, a box of videos, a box full of photographs and postcards and letters.
And a standard lamp, which he bought in a junk shop to make his room look civilised, lunging over his shoulder from the mess behind him.
All of it squeezed into his dad’s car, and he sits there and smiles and holds his open hand up beside his face.
In the background there’s a boy on a tricycle, staring.
There’s a photo of me and another girl, Alison, and I can’t remember who took it.
I’m standing next to her, pointing, shocked and laughing, and I’m surprised to see how similar I look, really, the same short blonde hair, the same small square glasses.
Alison’s pulling a wideopen face at the camera, freshly studded tongue flaring out of her mouth, fingers curled out like cat-claws.
And I’m pointing at her tongue and looking right into the lens, looking right out at myself these few years later, with a telephone in my hand, unable to dial.
I sat there thinking about the day she’d got it done, talked into it by the boy with the ring through his eyebrow who lived in her house, how she kept changing her mind all morning.
Eventually she went to a place round the corner, an upstairs place with a sign on the door saying no children no spectators.
It was a week before she could speak properly again, and then all she talked about was how excited and pleased she was with it.
She kept sticking her tongue out at men in the pub, just to see how they’d react.
By the end of the summer she was saying she might have to take it out to get a job.
It was a strange time.
People were slipping out of the city unexpectedly, like children getting lost in a crowd, leaving nothing but temporary addresses and promises to keep in touch.
I didn’t know what to do, there was a feeling of time running out and a loss of momentum, of opportunities wasted.
It was a good summer, long and hot, the days cracked open and bare, but it was hard to enjoy when it felt so deadended.
We spent our days on the front doorstep, circling job adverts with optimistic red felt-pens, trying to make plans, talking about travelling, or moving to London, or opening a cafe, each plan sounding definite until the next morning.
I don’t think any of us had the confidence, not for the sort of plans we were making, not for all those websites and fashion boutiques and doughnut shops.
A time of easy certainty had come to an end, and most of us had lost our nerve.
We used to sit on those front steps long into the evenings, long after the conversations had faltered, dragging our duvets downstairs when the stars finally squeezed out, flicking the ringpulls of empty beercans, blowing tunes into empty wine bottles.
Wondering what to do next.
Most of the photos I’ve got were taken in that last week, rushing around, trying to make up for three unrecorded years.
Pictures of the house, my bedroom, the front door with the number painted on it, the view of the street from my window.
But mostly the pictures are of my friends then, drinking tea in the kitchen, piled up in someone’s bed, throwing a frisbee across the street.
And in all the pictures they’re looking straight at the camera, always grinning and waving.
I sat in my room that evening, the phone still in my hand, looking at all those photographs, looking closely, as though I’d not seen them before.
Studying the expressions on their faces, looking for hidden details.
It was strange how important the pictures felt, like vital documents that should be kept in a fireproof tin instead of being blu-tacked and pinned to the wall.
Somehow, although we spent the whole summer doing nothing, it felt like the most significant part of my life, until now.
I dialled the number again, and it was engaged.
I don’t think I knew what I was going to say. I don’t know why I thought I’d find it any easier to tell her than Sarah.
I think I thought that, once I’d managed to say it, she’d at least be the one who would be able to help.
I think I hoped there would be shock and tearful reaction, that then she’d offer practical help and sensible advice.
That maybe she’d say why don’t you come and stay for a few days and we’ll talk it through, you and me and your dad.
Like a family, like a proper family.
I don’t know why I thought these things, I don’t know why I thought anything would be any different suddenly.
Perhaps I thought that exceptional circumstances could change the way of things.
I sat there, listening to the engaged tone, trying to think of the right words.
Telephone conversations with my mother are never very easy.
There always seems to be a weighting inside them, things left unspoken, things not fully spoken.
She says things gently and discreetly, carefully holding back her full implication.
Like holding playing cards against her chest.
When I told her about my latest new job she said that sounds very nice and what other opportunities have you been looking at?
She says things like, I don’t think you’re making full use of your degree, my love.
She says things like, it doesn’t sound as though you’re stretching yourself.
She doesn’t say what the hell kind of a job is that, or what are you actually doing with your life here?
I wonder if I wish she would.
I got through eventually.
My dad answered, he picked up the phone and sighed and said yes, please?
He’s always answered the phone like that, as though he was afraid of who might be trying to speak to him, of what they might be intending to say.
I said hi dad it’s me, is mum there, and he said no, no she’s not, she’s gone out tonight.
I’m not sure whether I was disappointed or relieved.
I could hear him clutching the phone tightly, holding it away from his face as though he didn’t think it was entirely safe, the way he always does, and I knew that I wouldn’t say anything to him.
I knew it was a secret I would be keeping to myself a little longer.
He asked me about my job, he asked me about people I haven’t seen for a long time and I said they were fine.
I said something about football, and then I let him get back to watching the television.
I put the phone down and imagined what I might have said, mum there’s something I have to say, or mum I need to talk to you about something.
Mum I’m not sure how to say this but.
I think I was hoping she might realise something was wrong without me having to say so, that I could talk about my new shoes and she would say so what is it you’re really telling me?
Like the mum in the old British Telecom adverts.
I looked at another photograph, of Simon and Rob and Jamie dancing naked down the street in the first pale hours of that summer, celebrating the election.
I remembered that momentous night, looping a cable through the window and setting the TV up in the front garden, gathering around it with pizza and weed and the excitement of history.
I remembered coming back from the garage at midnight, armed with fresh snack supplies and seeing my friends’ faces lit up by the shrine of the television.
Shining and blue and flickering in the darkness.
Already looking like ghosts.
Chapter 6 (#ulink_46c0ba55-3607-5607-9faa-c8aabe4d3767)
The woman at number nineteen, she has finished hanging out her washing, and now she steps into her kitchen and begins to think about breakfast. The children will be waking soon, and the whole household will begin then to fumble into the morning, her husband, her husband’s father, her husband’s mother. She reaches up to the cupboard over the sink and fetches down boxes of cereal, four packets of sugared grains and flakes which she clutches to her chest. As she turns to drop them on the table she sees her young daughter leaning against the doorframe, watching her with her big worried eyes. Before she can say anything, her daughter is hurrying to the cutlery drawer, counting out spoons, turning to the crockery cupboard, struggling with the bowls. She is still wearing her night-clothes. Hey, hey, says her mother, smiling, dress first, washing and clothing okay? And she takes her little arms and hustles her out of the kitchen. The child does not say a word, and the mother listens to her shuffling up the stairs, a shadow of concern skimming briefly across her face.
She finishes preparing the breakfast table, and as she puts the kettle on to boil the twin boys come rattling down the stairs and launch into the food, clutching their spoons like fighting sticks. She tries to talk to them about the day, what are they going to do and would they like to go with Nana and Papa to see Auntie for tea, but their mouths are full of soggy cereal and it is all they can do to breathe between shovelfuls. She relents, and tells them they must not go further than the shop at the end of the street and that they must not go into people’s gardens without asking.
She strokes them both on the head, as if to bless their day, and she tells them to be good, and as they leave the room she sees again her daughter standing in the doorway, her head leaning up against the frame and her big eyes looking blankly upwards. She is wearing the floral dress with the gold edge which was made for her by Auntie, she is looking pretty she thinks. She says what would you like, and the young girl says nothing but slides into the chair vacated by her brother and pours herself a bowl of wheatflakes. She eats slowly, gathering the flakes into small spoonfuls, looking out of the window, chewing each portion thoughtfully.
And when she is finished she turns to her mother and says mummy can I watch cartoons now, just like that, no expression, as if she were a child extra in a cheap soap opera and not the centre of a loving family. Her mother nods her assent and watches her drift through to the front room, trailing her hand along the wallpaper.
Perhaps she is nervous about starting school, she thinks to herself, or perhaps she is becoming poorly. She turns to the window and touches her face, she is feeling weary of the day already. The boys stamp down the stairs and out of the front door. It is not yet eight o’clock. She runs the tap to wash the children’s dishes. She clenches her fist under the rushing water until it becomes hot, she holds it there.
The man in the attic flat of number twenty-one, he is watching the twin boys from next door running in the street, he is leaning from the window to smoke a cigarette, he is being watched by the woman lying on the bed behind him. They are both naked. They’re out already he says, them kids from next door, they’re out already, what time is it? You probably woke them up with your snoring the woman says, rolling onto her side and stretching across the floor to pick up her watch. They’re cheeky little shits them two the man says, I saw them throwing stones at those girls over the road last week, when they was sitting in their own garden. Probably just looking for attention the woman says, you know what boys are like. It’s not even eight she says, I’m going back to sleep she says, but she doesn’t and she lies awake looking at the nakedness of the man, at his feet tilted upwards and the tension rising up the muscles of his legs as he stretches to lean out of the window, and the rise and pause and fall of the curve of his shoulders as he savours his cigarette. At the small dragon tattoo on his shoulderblade. At the long pink lines and the small purple scuff marks scattered all over his skin, scratches and bruises she’s gifted him in heated moments of fury and passion.
She props herself up on one elbow and catches sight of herself in the mirror, she looks at herself, her skin clean and unmarked except for a single thumb-sized bruise at the top of one arm. She looks at her hair, newly dyed a deep henna red, she turns a length of it in her fingers. She’s still pleased with it, even though he hasn’t yet said anything. She likes the way it complements her eyes.
They’re looking in people’s windows now the man says, his irritation furrelling over his shoulder like smoke, what are they playing at? Forget it she says, come back to bed she says, and she rolls to one side to make room for him. Little fuckers he says, they’ve got water-pistols he says, and he turns away, back into the room, striding across the floor to squash his cigarette end into the ashtray. What did you say he says to the woman, I missed that. She says, I told you to come back to bed and she reaches out her arm towards him and when he kisses her the stubble on his face smells of smoke and sunshine.
In the street outside, the twins from number nineteen are peering into the front window of number twenty, the slightly older one balanced on a pair of bricks to see better, looking through a small gap in the curtains. In the room in front of them, a man with thinning hair and a carefully trimmed moustache is doing stretching exercises, lifting his pale arms high in the air, lowering them towards the floor, placing his hands on his fleshy hips, arching his body from side to side. He is completely naked, and the boys suddenly giggle out loud and cover their mouths, the man with the tidy moustache turning and waving them away, dragging the curtains more fully closed.
They vanish, and he stands by the now safely shielded window, clenching and unclenching his fists, breathing a little heavily. They are not good boys, he is thinking, they are not good boys at all. He has seen them, he knows about them, he has seen them dropping their crisp bags in the street, their sweet wrappings. He stretches his hands towards the floor, his knees almost straight, his bony fingers only half a dozen inches from the carpet. He straightens, slowly and carefully, he puts on a dressing gown and he steps into his small kitchen, reaching for the kettle, glancing into the backyard and his hands yank suddenly up into the air as if he were shaking out a tablecloth and he mutters shameful words, he says to nobody what is it now? where does it come from all of this? and he pulls down the kitchen blind so that he does not have to look at it.
In the flat upstairs, an old man is looking for a box of matches to light the gas under the kettle, he turns to the table and he sees an envelope lying there, his name scratched across it in wavering handwriting. He smiles, he turns and opens the cutlery drawer of the Welsh dresser, he takes out an envelope with his wife’s name on it, his own handwriting as newly unreliable as hers.
He places the two cards side by side, he thinks about opening his for a moment and decides not to. He looks for the matches, and he thinks about that day.
It wasn’t a spectacular wedding. It happened in a hurry, and they only spent one night together before he went away again, went away properly. They’d been told to tie up their loose ends, and they knew what that meant, so he’d sent her a telegram, just before his leave, saying are you at a loose end stop buy a nice dress stop will buy rings stop, and they’d rushed off to the registry office, dragging in the woman from the cake shop for a witness.
But it was a wedding, and they looked each other in the eyes and said the words, they made their vows and they have kept them all these years.
Her hand in his hand, watching him say to love and to cherish, watching him say until death us do part.
When they kissed, as they were signing the register, the woman from the cake shop turned her face away, as though she was embarrassed.
And they took the wedding certificate back to their new house, propped it up on the chest of drawers at the foot of the bed, and spent the whole evening looking at it, both feeling as though they’d just stepped off a fairground ride, both feeling dizzy and exhilarated, struggling to get their breath back, struggling to absorb everything that had happened.
She said, tell me the story of us, tell me it the way you’ll tell our children when they ask.
She said it a lot, in those first few years, when she was feeling sad, or poorly, or she couldn’t sleep. She’d lay her head on his chest, her hands tucked up under her chin, and she’d say tell me the story of us, tell me it the way you’d tell our children.
And he’d always say it the same way, starting once upon a time there was a handsome soldier boy with a smart uniform and he went to a dance with his friends and minded his own business, and she’d always lift her head up and pull a shocked face and say you were not minding your own business you were making eyes at me all evening you’re a big fat liar.
And he’d always put two fingers to her lips and say so the handsome soldier boy was surprised to see a nice-looking young lady standing in front of him and asking him to dance, and she’d say what happened then, did they dance, did they dance well?
Oh yes, he’d always say, yes indeed, they did dance, and they danced very well, spinning and twirling and looking deeply in one another’s eyes so they didn’t know everyone else was looking at them so amazed and you know what happened that very moment he’d say, not waiting for her response, what happened without them even knowing was they were in love.
And then? she’d say, what happened then? Did they kiss? and he’d say no no, not so soon, he was a gentleman you see, a gentleman as well as a soldier and so he didn’t kiss her until the second time they met he’d say, and she would ask him for more details and he would tell them to her, their first meetings, where they went to, what they did, the first night they spent together in the hotel in Blackpool and she’d say you mustn’t tell the children about that bit and he’d laugh and say no.
And that first time he’d told the story, that night, lying side by side on the bed, fully clothed, neither of them said anything when he finished, they just lay there looking at the certificate, looking at the official type, the formal words, looking at their names laid down in sloping black ink.
And she’d whispered it’s a good story isn’t it?, unbuttoning his shirt, spreading her fingers out across his chest as though smoothing wrinkles from a bedsheet, and he’d said yes, yes it is, it’s a good story. And the last thing she’d said to him, just before she went to sleep that night, quietly, almost as though she thought he was asleep, she said you will come back won’t you, you will keep safe, please, you will come home?
Chapter 7 (#ulink_218f54a8-f5f2-556d-a8c7-b0ae8558480f)
When I got back from that first appointment it rained for a day and a half.
It woke me up in the middle of the night, a quiet noise at first, burbling across the roof, spattering through the leaves of the trees, and it was good to lie there for a while and listen to it.
But later, when I got up, it was heavier and faster, pouring streaks down the windows, exploding into ricochets on the pavement outside.
I stood by the window watching people in the street struggle with umbrellas.
I phoned work and said I can’t come in I’m sick.
I thought about what my mother would say if she saw me skiving like this, I remembered what she said when I was a child and stuck indoors over rainy weekends.
There’s no use mooching and moping about it she’d say, it’s just the way things are.
Why don’t you play a game she’d say, clapping her hands as if to snap me out of it.
And I’d ask her to point out all the one-player games and she’d tut and leave the room.
I wonder if that’s what she’ll say when I finally tell her, that it’s the way things are, that there’s no use mooching and moping about it.
It doesn’t seem entirely unlikely.
She used to lecture me about it, about taking what you’re given and making the most of it.
Look at me with your dad she’d say, gesturing at him, and I could never tell if she was joking or not.
But it’s how she was, she would always find a plan B if things didn’t go straight, she would always find a way to keep busy.
If it was raining, and she couldn’t hang the washing out, she would kneel over the bath and wring it all through, savagely, until it was dry enough to be folded and put away.
If money was short, which was rare, she would march to the job centre and demand an evening position of quality and standing.
That was what she said, quality and standing, and when they offered her a cleaning job or a shift at the meatpackers she would take it and be grateful.
She always said that, she said you should take it and be grateful.
And so I tried to follow her example that day, hemmed in by the rain, I sat at the table and read all the information they gave me at the clinic.
I tried to take in all the advice in the leaflets, the dietary suggestions, the lifestyle recommendations, the discussions of various options and alternatives.
I read it all very carefully, trying to make sure I understood, making a separate note of the useful telephone numbers.
I even got out a highlighter pen and started marking out sections of particular interest, I thought it was something my mother might approve of.
But it was difficult to absorb much of the information, any of the information, I kept looking through the window and I felt like a sponge left out in the rain, waterlogged, useless.
I was distracted by the pictures, by all these people looking radiant and cheerful, smartly dressed and relaxed.
I knew I didn’t look like that, I knew I didn’t feel relaxed or cheerful.
I didn’t feel able to accept what my body was doing to me, and I still don’t.
It felt like a betrayal, and it still does.
And I kept trying to tell myself to calm down.
To tell myself that this is not something out of the ordinary, this is something that happens.
This is not an unbearable disaster, a thing to be bravely soldiered through.
It’s something that happens.
But I think I need somebody to say these words for me to believe them, I don’t think I can speak clearly or loudly enough when I say them to myself.
One of the leaflets mentioned telling people, who to tell, how long to wait.
I thought about why I haven’t told anyone yet, and what this means.
Perhaps not telling people makes it less real, perhaps it’s not even definite yet, really.
Perhaps I need time to get used to the idea of it, before people’s good intentions start hammering down upon me like rain.
Another of the leaflets had a section on physical effects.
You may find you become tired it said, you may find yourself experiencing dizziness, insomnia, a change in appetite.
There was a list of these things, half a dozen pages of alphabetical discomforts and pains.
I spent a long time thinking about them all, wondering which ones I’d get, wondering how well I would cope.
I thought about backache, nausea, indigestion, faintness and cramps and piles.
I thought about waking in the night with a screaming pain, clutching at the covers with clawed hands.
I thought about banging my fists against my head to distract myself from it.
I thought about religious people who train themselves to walk over burning coals and I wondered if I could control my body in the same way.
I didn’t think I could, and I got scared and gathered all the leaflets up, stacked them away in a kitchen drawer with the scissors and sellotape and elastic bands.
By the middle of the afternoon it had rained so much that the drains were overflowing, clogged up with leaves and newspapers.
The water built up until it was sliding across the road in great sheets, rippled by the wind and parted like a football crowd by passing cars.
I was shocked by the sheer volume of water that came pouring out of the darkness of the sky.
Watching the weight of it crashing into the ground made me feel like a very young child, unable to understand what was really happening.
Like trying to understand radio waves, or imagining computers communicating along glass cables.
I leant my face against the window as the rain piled upon it, streaming down in waves, blurring my vision, making the shops opposite waver and disappear.
There was a time when I might have found this exhilarating, even miraculous, but not that day.
That day it made me nervous and tense, unable to concentrate on anything while the noise of it clattered against the windows and the roof.
I kept opening the door to look for clear skies, and slamming it shut again.
And then around teatime, from nowhere, I smashed all the dirty plates and mugs into the washing-up bowl.
Something swept through me, swept out of and over me, something unstoppable, like water surging from a broken tap and flooding across the kitchen floor.
I don’t quite understand why I felt that way, why I reacted like that.
I wanted to be saying it’s just something that happens.
But I was there, that day, slamming the kitchen door over and over again until the handle came loose.
Smacking my hand against the worktop, kicking the cupboard doors, throwing the plates into the sink.
Going fuckfuckfuck through my clenched teeth.
I wanted someone to see me, I wanted someone to come rushing in, to take hold of me and say hey hey what are you doing, hey come on, what’s wrong.
But there was no one there, and no one came.
I stopped eventually, when I noticed my hands were bleeding.
I must have cut them with the smashed pieces of crockery, picking pieces out of the sink to throw them back in.
I stood still for a few moments, breathing heavily, watching blood drip from my hands onto the broken plates, wanting to sit down but unable to move.
I watched the blood pooling across the palms of my hands.
I looked at the broken plates and mugs.
I wondered where such a fierce rage had come from, and I was scared by the scale of it, by the lack of control I’d had for those few minutes.
I don’t remember ever feeling like that before, and it worried me to think that I might be changing in ways I could do nothing about.
I washed my hands clean, letting the blood and water pour over the broken crockery, counting about a dozen cuts, each as thin as paper.
The water began to sting, so I wrapped my hands in kitchen towel and held them up into the air, leaning back against the worktop, watching the blood soak through.
Later, when the bleeding had stopped and I’d covered my hands in a patchwork of plasters I found in the bathroom, I tried to get myself some food.
I thought it would make me feel better.
I’d been planning to go out and buy something, but I couldn’t face it so I stayed in and ate what I could find.
Peanut butter, sardines, cream crackers, marshmallows.
It gave me a belly-ache, which seemed an appropriate end to a bad day, a wasted and damaged day.
And it kept on raining, rattling endlessly into the ground, piling up in the streets, wedged into the gutters and the drains.
It made the street look squalid and greasy.
People were scurrying along the pavement, their coats tugged tightly around themselves, their heads bowed as though they had something to hide.
And I was locking the door and closing the curtains, and I did have something to hide.
Chapter 8 (#ulink_820c8df4-4fba-5364-bf9e-b27b015c33b3)
At number eighteen, the boy with the sore eyes is crouching on the floor among his arrangement of things, he is still thinking about the girl at number twenty-two, the girl with the short blonde hair and the little square glasses, the girl with the nicest sweetest smile he thinks.
He’s thinking about the time he met her properly, besides seeing her in the street and sometimes saying hello, the time at a party round the corner when she’d stood and talked with him for a long part of the evening, and hadn’t seemed to notice his blinking and hand scratching, perhaps because it was dark or perhaps because she didn’t make him feel nervous by acting as though he was, the way most people do. They talked a lot, and laughed, and poured each other drinks and he’d felt comfortable and good and real with her, and she’d touched his arm once or twice, and looked him in the eye without saying anything, and although they hadn’t kissed he thinks probably they could have done. It was there is what he thinks. And she’d asked him to walk her home because she felt tired and a bit uncomfortable and so he did and she held onto his arm for support, held on quite tightly because she said the pavement was moving like on a boat and she said sorry I’m not normally this drunk honestly and laughed. She laughed a lot, that night. And just before she went inside he said, very quickly, do you want to go out sometime, for a drink or something or? And she’d grinned a big squint-eyed grin and said yes yes, Wednesday night, I’ll come round Wednesday night and we’ll go somewhere and then she’d gone in and closed the door and he’d gone home and barely slept until dawn.
Next door, in the back bedroom of number sixteen, a young girl is playing by herself. She has a picture book with removable sticky figures, she is removing them and replacing them, standing them on their heads on the tops of houses, making them swim in duckponds, dropping them from a height and seeing where they land. She is waiting for her father to wake, so she can have breakfast and get dressed.
He rubs at his bloodshot eyes, the young man next door, he piles up his collection of things and squeezes them into a coffee jar, writing the date and his name on a sticker on the lid. He thinks about that Wednesday night, waiting in, trying to be relaxed, waiting for the doorbell, checking that it worked, putting music on and off. Sitting outside at midnight and realising she wasn’t coming.
He pulls the large floor-rug to one side and lifts up a loose section of floorboard. His brother, when he’d emailed him about it, had said well she was probably just so drunk she forgot, that’s all it is, go and talk to her again, she’ll still be up for it, but he’d never been so sure, maybe she’d forgotten or maybe really she’d changed her mind. Maybe she’d been too embarrassed to say anything to him about it. He remembers the next time he’d seen her, how she’d looked at him vaguely and said hello and looked away. He remembers how beautiful he sees her, the way she walks, the way she lifts her head when she laughs. How easily they’d talked together that night, the touch of her hand on his arm. It could have been there is what he thinks.
He places the jar between the floor joists, nesting it among the dust and the cables and pipes like an egg, a bundle of memories waiting to hatch into the future. Tomorrow he will pack his bags and move to another house a few streets away, and he is reluctant to vanish without a trace. He replaces the floorboard, lays the rug over the top, returns the bed to its original position.
Today, he thinks. He could go and talk to her today. Say excuse me I hope you don’t mind me asking but do you remember that night, that party? Say excuse me but, really, I am actually very much in love with you. He smiles at the impossibility of it, blinks, scratches the back of his hand.
He puts some bread in the toaster, he walks down the stairs and out into the street. There is hardly anyone out yet, except for the art student at number eleven, and the boy on the tricycle, his head down, rattling and racing along the pavement. He looks up at the clear sky, stretching his arms, turning and briefly looking at the closed front door of number twenty-two. He hears the kerchang of the toaster and goes back inside, leaving the door open.
She opens her front door, just a little, just enough, and she hops down her front steps, the young girl from number nineteen, glad to be out of the house and away from the noise of her brothers. The television was boring and strange anyway, it was all people talking and she didn’t understand. She taps her feet on the pavement, listening to the sound her shiny black shoes make against the stone, and then she strides along the pavement with her fingers linked behind her back the way she’s seen her father walk when he’s walking with the other old men. She watches her feet as they spring between the paving slabs, enjoying the bounce and the hop of it, counting each step, stopping when she gets to twenty because that’s as far as she knows.
She looks up, balancing on one foot, and spins around and around and she can see a spiral blur of sandy-coloured houses and blue sky and streaks of red and blue and yellow from people’s curtains and all the colours spin round and when she stops suddenly it all carries on spinning for a moment and she feels dizzy. She sees a man sitting on his garden wall, a young man, and he is looking at her and smiling. She looks away quickly, and counts twenty steps back towards her house, bounce bounce, not stepping on the cracks.
The man sitting on his wall, outside number eleven, he is drawing a picture of the street. He has pens and pencils and rulers and erasers and a compass and a protractor, and he is drawing a very detailed picture of the row of houses opposite, trying to get the correct perspectives and elevations, trying to capture all of the architectural details.
That is what he wants to get onto the page, all the architectural details. For now there are just a few lines, faintly etched and erased and re-etched, between a scattering of dots and noted numbers and angles. He wants to do a good job of this today. He’s been told that his drawing is weak and that he must improve it, and he doesn’t want to lose his place on the course so he is trying very hard. He begins to measure the widths of the houses, squinting along the length of his arm, looking for the correct proportions. These houses are very different from the houses in his street, of course. The colour, the shape, the way they are all joined into one another, the height of them, it is all different from his village at home. But he likes them, there is a pride to see in these houses, in their age and in their grandeur. He knows that they were built over a hundred years ago, and that they were built for the owners of the textile factories, houses big enough to have servants squeezed into the attics and cellars, houses rich enough to have stained glass over the doors and sculpted figure heads amongst the eaves. He wonders about the people who lived in these houses first, the rich gentlemen and their elegant wives, their cooks and butlers and footmen, what they would say if they could see their houses now, shunted into the poor part of town, broken up into apartments and bedsits, their gardens mostly unkept, their paintwork mostly crumbling.
But still he thinks, even if they are not what they were they are still good houses, in a good street with wide pavements and plenty of trees for shade and life. He measures the distances between the ridges and the eaves, calculating the angles, and as he looks towards the far end of the street he notices that the hop-skipping girl is standing right behind him and is looking at his skeletal drawing.
He looks at her. She looks at the paper, at him, and back at the paper.
It is the street he says, and he waves a hand at the row of houses opposite, I am drawing your marvellous street, and she giggles because his accent makes marvellous rhyme with jealous. Where are the windows she says, in a very still and quiet voice, and she rubs her finger on the page.
Not yet he says, smiling at her, first I draw the walls and roofs and then I will draw the windows and doors and all the things. She looks at him, and at the page, and across the street. Where is the dog she says in the same voice, and she moves her finger across the page to where she thinks the dog should be.
Okay he says, I will put the dog in for you. But only after the windows he says, and he smiles at her. She looks at him, she turns around and skips across the road.
He watches her for a moment, he takes a pencil and sketches in the lines of the rooftop, the ground, the eaves, carefully, hesitantly, joining the marks of the measurements he has made. He looks from the page to the building, he sighs and he pulls at the loose skin around the corners of his forehead, it is very difficult he is thinking.
Upstairs at number twenty, the old man stands by the window, waiting for the kettle to boil, watching the twin brothers creeping into the garden of number seventeen, raised up on the fronts of their feet like a couple of Inspector Clouseaus.
The old man pushes his fingers into the thick white strands of his hair, he watches.
The boys are carrying elaborate waterguns, bright coloured plastic, blue cylinders and pink pressure pumps, green barrels and triggers, and they move to stand either side of the open front-room window, pressing flat against the wall like miniature sentries in a Swiss clocktower.
The kettle behind him sighs its way to a boil, and he watches the boys plunge their heads and arms into the billow of the drifting net curtain, their thin high voices echoing up to his window.
They re-emerge, they turn and they run from the garden, waving their guns like cowboys and indians, their faces hysterical with laughter and excitement and fear. A young man with wet hair appears at the window, shouting, wiping his face with the palm of his hand.
The old man laughs quietly. He likes the twins, they’re funny, they remind him of his great-nephew, the same energy, the same cheek. He laughs again, and the breath whistles in the top of his lungs, the pain is suddenly there again, like cotton thread being yanked through his airways, the whistling getting louder, the hot red streaks beginning to splinter across his vision and he leans against the worktop, gulping for oxygen, jaw flapping, a fish drowning in air.
The kettle shrieks to a boil. The lid rattles with the pressure of the steam.
Downstairs, the man with the carefully trimmed moustache is getting dressed. He is standing in front of a mirror, fastening the top button of a crisp white shirt. He combs his thin black hair, straight down at the back, straight down at the sides, either side of a straight central parting on the top. He puts the comb back in its plastic wallet and takes a bowtie from the open leather suitcase on his table, where he keeps all his clothes. He loops it around his collar, lifting his head to tie the knot, adjusting it, tweaking at the corners until he gets it straight.
Upstairs, the old man clutches at his throat, head tipped back, mouth gaping, silent, staring at the ceiling like a tourist in the Sistine Chapel.
Chapter 9 (#ulink_267b7817-e20d-5361-8028-8a2c5a3519b7)
It took me a long time to get to sleep that night.
The rain was still spattering against the window, and there was a loud fall of water from a broken gutter onto the concrete below.
I blocked my ears with the bedcovers, I breathed slowly and deeply, I counted to a hundred, I counted to five hundred.
I gave up eventually, and put the light on, and sat up in bed to read.
But I couldn’t concentrate, I kept thinking about that day, that moment, the afternoon.
About what happened and why there are so many names I can’t remember.
About whether I knew the names in the first place.
Whenever I tried to read my book the images kept returning, small moments from that day and I don’t understand why I can’t leave it alone.
It’s a strange feeling, almost like a guilty feeling, almost like I feel responsible.
I thought about going back up to my room that morning, after a shower and a mouthful of breakfast.
Swinging the window open, and the flood of fresh summer air that had come sweeping in, the sweetness of a rolling wind that was still clean from the countryside.
Seeing the guy from over the road poking his head through an attic skylight and tipping a bucket of water over some kids in their front garden.
I tried to remember his name, and all I could remember was the ring through his eyebrow, the way he used to smack the palm of one hand with the back of the other.
I remembered how hard it was to pack, how I spent the morning rearranging boxes and bags and rewriting lists.
I hadn’t known what I was going to need, what I should throw away or leave behind, what I should give to someone for safekeeping.
I still hadn’t known where I was going.
I remembered phoning the landlord and asking for another week, and panicking when he said people were due to move in the next evening.
I remembered looking at my overflowing room, and the empty boxes, and not knowing where to begin.
I thought about how I’d gone and stood in Simon’s room for a while, looking at the sunlight brightening and fading on the ceiling.
Thinking about him leaving the week before, and how bare his room was now.
The unfaded squares on the wall where his posters had been.
The naked mattress on the floor, a curve in the middle where the springs had begun to fail.
And the things he’d left behind, unable to fit them into the boxes he’d squeezed into his dad’s car.
Coathangers in the wardrobe that rattled like skeletons when I stood on the loose floorboards.
A muted noticeboard on the desk, pimpled with drawing pins.
A paper lightshade he’d taken down but left behind, folded on the floor like a deflated accordion.
The room had a hardness in it without his things there, an emptiness that made me want to close the door, leave a do not disturb sign outside, let the dust settle.
I remembered going to the shops to buy binbags, and saying hello to the boy at number eighteen.
He was on his doorstep, reading, and I caught his eye and he smiled so I said hello.
I think it was the only time I ever spoke to him.
He said how are you doing, how’s the packing going, he said it with a little laugh, as though it was a joke.
Oh I said, fine I said, and I wondered how he knew that’s what I was doing.
There was a silence, and we looked at each other, and I noticed he was blinking a lot and I thought he looked nervous.
He said, last day of summer, everyone’s packing aren’t they, and he did the little laugh again, and I said well you know, all good things come to an end and he said yes.
I said well I’d better get to the shop, I’ll see you around, yes he said, yes, okay, well, see you then.
And he held up his hand, a wave like half a surrender, and by the time I walked back he had gone.
I remembered going back to my room and trying to imagine it being like Simon’s.
I took a poster off the wall to see how much the sunlight had faded the paint in the time I’d been there.
I took all my clothes out of the wardrobe and made the coathangers rattle.
I couldn’t picture the room being as changed and empty as Simon’s already was.
I wanted to leave a note for the next tenant, leave a trace of myself behind, I wanted to be able to go back years later and find a plaque with my name on it screwed to the wall.
I thought about all this, lying in bed listening to the rain, looking at the room I sleep in now, another room in another city.
I looked at the objects that make it my room, the calendar on the wall, the colour of the curtains, the photographs.
I thought about all the other people who’ve slept in this room before me, about what traces they’ve left behind.
It took me a long time to get to sleep.
And when I woke up in the morning the room felt different, haunted, and I had to get out of bed quickly.
It had stopped raining, finally, but the street outside was still wet, swathes of dirty water across the road, sodden pages of newsprint glued to the pavement like transfers.
Perhaps the words will soak into the stone I thought, yesterday’s stories imprinted like cave paintings, like a tattoo.
I left early for work, I didn’t want to stay in my flat after the previous day.
I couldn’t face cleaning up the broken plates or reading those leaflets again.
I got dressed and slipped out of the door without any breakfast, down the steps and past the back door of the shop downstairs.
There was a cold wind, but it was a dry wind and it felt good on my skin and I sucked big mouthfuls of it into my lungs.
There was a girl with a striped overall standing by the back door of the shop, smoking, I’ve seen her there before.
She smiled and said hello and I was surprised so I think I only nodded.
I walked along the main road, the wind blowing across my face, the traffic steaming slowly past me in fits and starts and stops.
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Jon McGregor
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: WINNER OF THE BETTY TRASK AWARDWINNER OF THE SOMERSET MAUGHAM AWARDLONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZEOn a street in a town in the North of England, ordinary people are going through the motions of their everyday existence – street cricket, barbecues, painting windows… A young man is in love with a neighbour who does not even know his name. An old couple make their way up to the nearby bus stop. But then a terrible event shatters the quiet of the early summer evening. That this remarkable and horrific event is only poignant to those who saw it, not even meriting a mention on the local news, means that those who witness it will be altered for ever.Jon McGregor′s first novel brilliantly evokes the histories and lives of the people in the street to build up an unforgettable human panorama. Breathtakingly original, humane and moving, If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things is an astonishing debut.