OK, Mr Field

by Katharine Kilalea

  I followed Mim down the ramp and across the entrance hall towards the laundry at the back of the house, which she’d repurposed as a study. At the end of the corridor she looked at me, as if about to reiterate whatever she’d been saying, then turned away and closed the door behind her. I stared at the laundry door, the angled floor tiles pointed toward it like arrows. It pained me, this door; there were hopes there, fragile hopes I didn’t entirely understand. The laundry pulled me toward itself even as it closed its door against me. I’d been standing there for some time when I heard somebody knocking on the front door, but instead of turning around to open it, my feet, as if powered by some external force, carried me down the corridor. Strange thoughts floated into my mind, the vague and fleeting kinds of associations that arrive when one’s eyes lose focus, as when looking out the window of a train. Not for the first time, the thought of Hannah Kallenbach occurred to me. Perhaps the house had ingested some aspect of her presence because several times, in the middle of some everyday activity, I’d had the feeling that she was standing there, watching me, so that not infrequently, as I wandered around doing whatever I was doing, I would find myself thinking What would Hannah Kallenbach think of this? or What would Hannah Kallenbach say about that?

  I reached the laundry and stopped, my attention fixed on the door handle, which was tarnished and slightly cocked. Well, said Hannah Kallenbach, what are you waiting for? If you want to see her, why then do you not knock? But my fingers gripped my trousers so tightly that they felt almost paralysed. From behind the door came computer noises and the sound of Mim’s desk chair rolling across the floor. She knows I’m here, I thought, so if she wants to see me, she’ll come and get me. Once, the militant sounds of her typing halted for a moment and my heart stiffened, but the door didn’t open.

  From behind me came another knock, louder now, but when I turned back to open the door there was nobody there, or rather I didn’t see the visitor immediately because he was standing to one side looking away from me towards something out of sight. The ivy that had been tethered to the door lay in a heap on the ground, leaving its small brown footprints on the wall. Hello? I said. And then Hello? again. The man looked around in surprise, as though I and not he was the unexpected guest. He wore a waistcoat and the baggy orange trousers a handyman wears, with pockets down both sides. His hair was curly, the kind which people like to call a mop of curls, though what it most resembled was an old tennis ball. His fleshy and rather froggy features made him look friendly, or if not friendly then at least unthreatening. Before he could speak, coming round the gravel path, a woman appeared in a bright patchwork dress and rubber shoes, so that together, in their colourful outfits, one might mistake them for members of a circus troupe.

  The name CURTIS TOUW rose from the business card he produced from one of his many trouser pockets. We’ve come about the plot, he said. They were coming to see everyone in the neighbourhood. The Touws accompanied me up the ramp to the courtyard, where we sat down at the table, each facing slightly different directions because the slab was too low to fit our legs under without angling the chairs to one side. Touw leant in and drew breath as if to start speaking, then pulled away, struggling to find words for what he had to tell me. He seemed to want to convey, through his difficultly in talking, the importance of whatever it was he’d come to say. How shall I begin? he seemed to be thinking. No, not like this. Several times he repeated this davening motion while, beside him, the woman extracted a number of black sketchbooks from his shoulder bag and laid them with exquisite care in rows on the table, as if preparing a card trick. The sea is very rhythmic today, she said, to which he replied, It’s not that rhythmic, actually.

  Resting his hand for a moment on one of the notebooks, Touw pushed it towards me. The first page was blank. On the second page, in an almost illegible calligraphic script, was written Manifesto for a House in the Sky. On the third page was a mountain painted in a grandiose style. It had a crystalline shape and no base, so that it seemed to hover, floating, in the clouds. Its outline had been sketched in pencil and filled in with watercolour inks – taupe, yellow and grey – which seeped out in places. Did you know what you wanted to be when you were a child? Touw said, and I said, No. Which wasn’t true because when I was a boy I’d wanted to play the oboe but my mother, who’d found the sound of air being squeezed through a tiny hole painful to listen to, had bought me a piano instead. Nobody wants to hear about your personal trials and griefs, she’d said. Your trials and griefs are boring.

  When I was a child, Touw said, I wanted to make people happier. So my teachers said I should be a psychologist. But then I found out that all a psychologist does is sit in a room all day, talking. And what’s the use of talking? There’s no use in talking. I wanted to make things happen. His wife opened her own notebook and transcribed this. While he was speaking, Touw’s eyes had wandered to the fenced-off area of land behind the house. The plot had been empty since I arrived, a razed patch of earth with a corrugated-metal hut to one side whose door sometimes rattled in the wind. A sign was affixed to its gate reading:

  CAUTION

  INCOMPLETE SITE

  RISK OF ACCIDENT

  Behind the plot was the mountain. It had the same features as the watercolour mountain in the notebook – the same granite peak with its few sideways-leaning trees, the lonely hiking trail cutting through the ferns – but it was less dreamy-looking so I hadn’t recognised it right away. The real mountain was heavy and angular whereas the watercolour version was light and ephemeral, with a more expressive profile. The watercolour mountain looked taller and sharper than the real one, perhaps because Touw had painted the vegetation line lower than it really was to emphasise the rock face and make it seem more brooding. Water from the painted waterfall fell more spectacularly than in actuality, cascading down the rocks, releasing clouds of vapour into the air as it hit the pool. Above, on the bare grey rocks of the highest peak, was painted a cap of shiny snow whose exaggerated whiteness, as in a religious painting, made the top of the mountain stand out against the sky. But where are the houses? I asked, because the sprawling colonial villas dotting the mountainside had either been demolished or wished away and replaced by what appeared to be a dozen or so Alpine cowsheds. The houses were too big and too far apart, said Touw. The next page showed a close-up of several cowsheds arranged side by side in a circle. Most people say smallness is bad, he said, but I say smallness is good. Most people want big houses but I think a house is a place for living in so it should bring people closer together. How can we feel close without being close? He leant forward as he spoke, reaching his fists one by one over the table as if pulling me towards him on a length of rope. Houses should have no doors. Walls separate us. Our houses should help us see each other and hear each other and be with each other more!

  The next picture showed more cowsheds slotted together. A column of text was squashed in the margins to one side of the page:

  A house is a mach-

  ine for living in tog-

  ether so our houses

  should be smaller to

  bring us closer tog-

  ether

  The houses are modular, said Touw, so they’re an ideal low-cost housing solution because they can be massproduced in a factory and assembled on-site. The first row of cowsheds joined up to form a single-storey circle, to which another row was added, and then another, etc. The sketchbooks showed the rising tower of cowsheds from different perspectives, in plan, in section, from street level, from above. The aerial view showed a void puncturing the core of the building. What’s that hole, I said. It’s not a hole, Touw said, it’s a light well. But it looked like a giant rubbish bin, the kind of place where people would throw their used batteries or empty drinks cartons.

  In one image a cowshed had been sliced open to show its interior: a single room, with no dividing walls, furnished with only a built-in bed and a built-in table, both of which, as in a ship’s cabin, could be folded up. Beneath the folded-aw
ay bed was a toilet, beneath the table was a recessed sink. Touw provided commentary on his diagrams, which were all the time getting progressively smaller and more anatomical-looking, so that I could hardly see without leaning in. This is a brand new type of hinge, he said, pointing his chubby fingers at a pair of interlocking loops. This is a suppressed windowsill, he said of two offset squares overlaid with a T-shape. And here – he identified a pair of bisecting lines – is a double glass window. All the while, in the background, the watercolour mountain seemed gradually to be getting less angular, as though somebody had smoothed its edges in sympathy with the tower’s rounded geometry. By the end of the notebook the tower must have been thirty or forty storeys high, though it was hard to say exactly because the upper floors were hidden by the clouds, through which the dazzling sun, refracted, stretched its mustard-coloured rays in all directions as if to announce the arrival of a great redeemer.

  Chapter 4

  Where I am is only

  where I am in relation to you and

  I’m further from you now than

  you are from me

  Mim was in the living room, her face framed by the deepening blue of the sky behind her, and I could tell from her expression that she was far away, as if remembering a dream or a passage from a novel. Where was she? I looked outside to see what she was seeing – because a window is a pair of glasses that pulls the world into focus – but all I could see was the middle of the tree outside; its canopy severed from the trunk and uppermost leaves.

  My old Bechstein had lost a foot on its journey over from London and rocked from side to side as I passed, releasing a mixed-up chord into the room. For several months the piano had been held by customs in some kind of depot and the involuntary outbursts it made as I neared it were the only interaction we’d had since being reunited. The long sea journey had left some nicks and dents in its carapace but it was still a beautiful instrument, one of the last made before the factory was destroyed during the war. It was the piano I’d played since childhood, so at first I’d felt its absence acutely, but rather than missing it more as our separation lengthened, my feelings towards the Bechstein had dulled. So that when a customs official eventually called to say that it risked being sent back to London (I didn’t realise I was being asked to offer a bribe) I was not just indifferent but oddly relieved, as though not only had I no desire to play the piano anymore, I wasn’t sure I’d ever liked it or wanted to play it at all. And a week later, when the big black instrument was finally hauled up Jacob’s Ladder by four straining men, I half-wished for some accident to happen so I wouldn’t have to see it or think about it or play it again.

  It was late afternoon and the heat of the day was lingering – it was thirty-eight degrees at least – and the air was buzzing with mosquitoes. I was hungry. All I’d eaten for lunch was a gherkin and a piece of leftover steak so old it tasted like liver. I sat down in the chaise, letting the seat slide back under the weight of my body until I was lying down. From the horizontal, the windows framed so perfectly a view of the sky – with no distractions apart from a few branches protruding above the height of the windowsill – that it seemed the window and the chaise might have been designed together for this exact purpose. The sky was clear, an emptiness stretching so far into the distance that I couldn’t help wanting to quantify it. I dropped an imaginary tennis ball from the highest point my eyes could imagine and counted the seconds it took to reach the ground. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four … But the calculation was inconclusive since it was always possible by straining my eyes a little harder to shift the starting point a little higher.

  Something reminded me of an afternoon a few weeks before when, having wandered for an hour or so along the coastal road that wound around the peninsula, Mim and I had discovered a dusty path which led past a few trees to a secluded beach. It was a small beach, not particularly beautiful, but popular with locals, a number of whom were out on such a hot day. There were a few people floating in the sea but really the water was too cold for swimming. We set down our towels and I went to the edge of the surf, wetting my ankles first, then wading in to my knees, then forcing myself deeper, taking a few shallow breaths against the cold.

  Afterwards I lay among the other bathers and listened to the low tones of voices around me. I covered my face with my hat. People were sleeping, murmuring, reading. I could hear their rising and falling inflections and could tell when a conversation passed from one person to another from their different vocal qualities and accents, but apart from the occasional exclamation like What? or No! and the umph as somebody stood up or sat down, I couldn’t hear what anyone was actually saying. From beneath the rim of my hat, as if in disguise, I scanned the bodies draped in their various degrees of nakedness along the slope leading to the shore. Presently Mim emerged from the water. She was wearing a stretchy black bikini with a sort of Rorschach blot pattern on it. A mother seagull and her chicks who had been pecking at the tideline, retreating each time a wave came in, stood very still as she passed, as if sensing danger, though their eyes were set so far apart that I couldn’t tell what they were looking at.

  I watched Mim cross the sand and sit down beside me. Are you sleeping? she said. And I said, Yes, tilting my hat lower to hide my eyes. Her face was blank beneath her thick black fringe and her thick black sunglasses. There was a still expression on her lips. She took off her bikini top, wrung it out, and laid it on the sand beside her. Then she sat for a while unknotting her hair with her fingers before pulling it into a neat, thick, black ponytail. Two women somewhere were talking about finding and curing disease on trees. It’s December! somebody said. Mim’s bikini top must have obscured the size of her breasts because they looked different without it. Beneath her light-brown skin – she had the kind of European skin that doesn’t discolour or glisten with sweat – the veins in her chest had gone a very bright blue. I liked looking at her. It wasn’t the nudity that attracted me, there was just something about her body which my eye liked, or had at least taken an interest in. And so it was, scanning her figure with a lazy and purposeless kind of attention, that my eyes came across her slightly goofy-looking large brown nipples.

  At the exact moment our gaze met, a trickle of water from Mim’s ponytail caused the nipples to contract, to crinkle a little, fixing me with such a discomfortingly frank stare that I wanted to look away. I lifted my hat. What was discomforting wasn’t the intense way these eyes were fastened on me, it was their indifference, which seemed to see things in the way that children seem to see things when they stare at you on buses. They were curious about me, yes, but it was a distant and bored sort of curiosity, a sort of scientific curiosity, as if what they were observing was not a known body – the body of someone they knew and loved – but something odd, something that didn’t make sense. What is it? they seemed to be asking. Is it a man? Hmmm … Let me see.

  Once seen, this second tier of eyes was difficult to unsee. With an almost electric shock I became aware that all around me, below faces hidden by hats or behind books and magazines, these various nipples (the fleshy pink ones, the wayward ones, the stupid-looking ones set too close together, droopy brown aureoles and vulnerable pink ones, the naive-looking mismatched nipples and alert upward-pointing ones, the dopey breasts facing too much to either side) stared unblinkingly from their various chests. What are you looking at? I thought. I’m just lying here! What’s so fascinating about that? But they watched me with such exquisite attention that, like those portraits which seem to follow the viewer with their eyes, it was hard to believe they were interested in anything but me.

  Now, lying on the chaise, I couldn’t see Mim’s face but I could tell from her breathing, which grew softer, that she’d turned away. The church bells rang twice in the bay. Perhaps I’d been asleep because I felt dizzy, as if I were both floating above the chaise and pressing so deeply into it that I might sink through the leather into the shadows beneath. My muscles felt weak and when I tried to stand, the chaise held me
in such a way – with humps under the back and knees – that, like an infant who hasn’t yet the strength or coordination to manoeuvre its body, it was hard to leverage myself up. I must have drifted off again because the next thing I knew the church bells were ringing three times in the bay and when I opened my eyes Mim was standing at the foot of the chaise. She was wearing a jacket. I opened my mouth to say something – Where are you going? I wanted to say, because a person in a jacket is always going somewhere – but my lips wouldn’t move. It was as though my mind and body had become separated in the moment of transition to consciousness, before the body has woken up. Mim leant down and kissed me – it was a short kiss, not long enough to develop into the promise of anything else. She didn’t open her mouth or relax her lips to expose their wet underside. When you kiss someone platonically, said Hannah Kallenbach, you use the outside of your lips, and when you love them sexually you use the inside. Then I fell asleep again and when I woke a third time it seemed that time was reversing itself because the church bells rang twice in the bay. A knocking was coming from somewhere in the house and it occurred to me for a moment that somebody was at the front door, but it was just the empty wooden curtain hooks rattling on the rail. Where’s Mim? I said – who was I asking? God? The universe? – and God or the universe, or Hannah Kallenbach perhaps, replied, She’s gone to the shops to buy you a birthday present. Which was nonsense, of course, because it wasn’t my birthday. And anyway, what kind of shops are open in the middle of the night?