I went around the living room righting pictures and sweeping up the glass and dead leaves that had blown in through the window. Several heavy-bodied spiders had relocated themselves from the garden into the corners of the ceiling. What a mess! I said to myself as I went around tidying things. What a mess. The dirt around me raised a wave of disgust so powerful that no sooner had I finished the living room than I started on the kitchen, emptying the fridge and washing the forgotten cups of tea which had been piled up in the sink since Mim left. What a mess, what a mess. I scrubbed the counter with steel wool until the yellow grime had come away from the grouting and the tiles had returned to their original clinical grey-green.
I made my way down the ramp to rake up the leaves and branches that had blown down from the mountain. But in the entrance hall I stopped and looked back towards the laundry. Halfway down the corridor was the washbasin. To wash off the outside world, the South African academic had told me. And at first I’d liked that, the idea of cleansing oneself of the outside world. After all, wasn’t that what I’d come for? To be cleansed of something? But this was the first time I’d actually used it and I scrubbed myself thoroughly, almost angrily, feeling it necessary to really clean myself. What are you doing? said Hannah Kallenbach. I’m cleaning out, I said. But cleaning out wasn’t right. Cleaning out was how South Africans described a certain kind of burglary. Someone has been cleaned out, they’d say, when the burglars had taken absolutely everything. I was flushing out, then.
Past the washbasin, at the end of the corridor, the door was closed. I’d avoided the laundry since Mim left. It was a lonely room, such a lonely room that just the idea of it was hateful. But that morning something felt different. I made my way past the basin, down the corridor, and, having opened the door, stood for a while in the doorway with my heart beating so hard it lifted the fabric of my pyjama shirt. It was a bright day but down there the air was thick, a damp grey haze. Unlike the first floor, which was raised off the ground on pillars, the rear section of the ground floor had been excavated from the rock behind it – scooped out of the mountain, you might say – which made it cavelike, especially now, when its window was almost completely covered over with ivy. The light was gone and in the dim light – it was half or almost completely dark – it was hard to make out the dimensions of the room, or where the walls met the ceiling.
Mim’s things were scattered around the room. Beside the door were shoes, at least ten pairs. What a mess, I thought, staring into the mustiness. Flakes of paint or dust covered every surface. The floor was piled so high with things that the only way to traverse it was by walking on top of them; each time I lowered my foot it raised a cloud of dust. A shrine of sweet wrappers was piled up on a stack of magazines beside a wineglass full of cigarette ends. Mim’s raincoat lay on the floor where she’d left it, having long forgotten her shape. Its pocket contained a few coins of too little value to bother with. What a mess, I was thinking, but there was something sinister about the arrangement of things across the room, something more than just mess, something unified, as though the objects had not just been strewn around randomly but were shying away from something. Like the debris from a fallout, said Hannah Kallenbach. Yes, I thought. But when I opened my mouth to say it – Like the debris from a fallout, exactly! – it felt like a heavy weight had been dropped onto my sternum and my voice came out squashed and childish. Which was apposite, I suppose, because there was a childishness about what I was doing, as if by tidying the room I could return things to how they were, which is of course the worst kind of wish, the wish to reverse something, the wish to say, I take it back, or, I preferred it before.
On Mim’s desk – a concrete slab that must have been designed as an ironing table – was her laptop, its red light flashing in resistance to the room’s gloom. When I touched it a half-finished game of solitaire appeared, causing several of the mosquitoes which invaded the house nightly (drawn to its glass windows as to a large lantern) to appear from the shadows, their affections transferred to the bright light of the screen. Beside the computer was a piece of paper. My dearest Max was written at the top of the page. My dearest Max, it said, nothing else. One side of Mim’s note was rough, as if torn from a book. On the other side was a block of printed text, a section of which had been circled in blue ink: Walls shouldn’t be strong, they should be soft and enclosing.
Then the computer went dead and the room went dark. Groping around among Mim’s papers and empty sweet wrappers I found a box of matches. The lit match cast a flickering glow, illuminating a spider suspended directly above me: it was thick and velvety and didn’t scurry. I took the flame to the bottom of the web and let it creep up to the spider sitting there, and burn it. For some reason – perhaps the flame had punctured a small hole in its abdomen before melting it completely – the spider began to squeal before disintegrating onto me (and Hannah Kallenbach too, because she was also there).
I rifled through Mim’s things looking for the rest of the letter, or other drafts of it. A stack of open books lay beside the computer, face down, as though Mim had stopped reading them halfway through. Perhaps she was bored of them, Hannah Kallenbach said. Or the opposite. I imagined Mim in a flurry of ambition, impatient with how long it took to get through a single book, thinking, Right! I’m going to read them all right now, at the same time. In the pale light from the corridor, I opened the uppermost book. It was called The Hidden Messages in Water and suggested that the shape of water was determined by its relationship to the people around it. There were photographs of water crystals, which, if you looked at them closely, revealed minute differentiations: a glass of water which had been shouted at, said the author, appeared murky under a microscope, while one subjected to declarations of love ran clear. Beneath it was a book called Aqueous Architecture, which was not, as I’d expected, about buildings with sea views or water features (like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater, which has a river running through it) but about how water changed the structure of consciousness. If The Hidden Messages in Water believed that human consciousness changed the structure of water, then Aqueous Architecture believed the reverse. The author wasn’t interested in buildings made with water, it turned out, so much as buildings made like water. He listed the various forms water could take: there was water, of course, but also water vapour, and cloud formations. What is a cloud? he asked. What would it be like to live in a fog or a mist?
But I was paying less attention to the contents of the books than scanning their margins for traces of Mim. Here and there she had struck out a sentence in blue ink or encircled a passage or inserted a question mark or note into the margins. On one dog-eared page she’d underlined the phrase Buildings should close around a body the way a mother holds a baby. On another, beside the words People should enter their houses like a drop of blood entering a puddle of water, she’d drawn an exclamation mark. I tried, by triangulating the marking to the words it referred to, to decode what she’d been thinking while she was reading, but the circles and exclamation marks meant nothing to me. I tried to gauge by the marks her pen had made what mood the hand making them had been in (a heavy underlining suggesting anger, a messy circle indicating frustration and a desire to move on). But really her marginalia were illegible, less like words or symbols than a long blue thread which had come unravelled somewhere inside Mim and I, now, was trying to reel back in.
At first the laundry had smelled of damp walls but beneath the musty odour I began to detect a second smell, a secretive smell, hidden beneath or rather within the first one, because although she’d been gone for some time, Mim’s perfume had been preserved in the airless room, only mixed in with the earthy scent of the walls, it’d grown deeper and muskier, more pungent, and so intensely evoked Mim’s presence that all at once it made me want to weep. So I sat down and cried, or tried to, because the tears were like grout; I only managed to squeeze a few out with great effort.
Then I came across a memory. It wasn’t a distant memory, nor one I’d forgott
en. In fact, it was something I’d have thought of often had I not made a strenuous effort to avoid it. The memory was of the afternoon Mim had arrived in South Africa. We were driving away from the airport and I remember that as we passed the large supermarket on the motorway out of Cape Town she turned to me, glassy-eyed, and said, You know, I really love that child (she was talking about her sister’s newborn son). She said, I love him in spite of all the reservations I have about children. Maybe it’s because I was there just after he was born (she arrived four or five hours afterwards) but last night when I said goodbye to him it felt like it was my own child I was leaving. I felt so close to him that it seemed there was no boundary between us, particularly physically, that there was no limit to my affection for him. I mean, of course there’s a limit, but … For some reason we were both crying. What are we crying about? I said and she laughed a humourless laugh that said, Life is funny, isn’t it?
Somewhere a dog started barking, causing another dog to bark somewhere else. On and on they went. Continuing my spring clean – which now was just a euphemism for scouring the room for clues about Mim – I came to a small metal filing cabinet. One by one I emptied the drawers, finding receipts, bank statements, a list of ingredients (polenta chilli anchovy mint) for a meal I don’t remember eating, expensive cufflinks, a silk scarf, French toothpaste, a prescription for medication I didn’t recognise, a variety of circulars addressed to Whomever it concerns, a picture of me as a boy with a severe side parting, a race-track packet of contraceptive pills (half of which had been popped from their plastic sockets), a stopped watch, a number of spiders the size of ping-pong balls and a letter to Jan Kallenbach from someone who didn’t know that he was dead so they couldn’t reach him.
The bottom drawer was locked so I knelt down on the floor and forced it open. Inside was a small notebook with a black cover. I hesitated before removing it, then did, but left the room without opening it. What are you waiting for? Hannah Kallenbach asked me, and I said, I don’t know. It wasn’t the contents of the notebook which frightened me, it was its secretiveness. It must, I thought, have contained something I didn’t want to know, or why would she have kept it in a locked drawer where I wouldn’t find it? All evening I carried Mim’s notebook around but did nothing with it. At the end of the day, I filled up the blue mosaic bathtub and sat in it, not washing myself, just sitting there with the notebook on my sternum, studying the weeds insinuating themselves through the edges of the skylight. Then, putting it aside, I slid down beneath the surface of the water until my head and shoulders were covered and the sea, from underwater, sounded like a distant volcano.
Chapter 8
The only way to understand
the sea is to drop
a grid on it
For days I delayed opening the notebook through a series of deferrals. I’d pick it up while brushing my teeth then put it down again so as not to ruin the experience by reading in the bright light of the bathroom. I’d pick it up while waiting for the kettle to boil then put it down again so the squealing wouldn’t break the flow of my concentration. I’d bathe for hours and comb my hair in various ways. The more I waited the more afraid I became of the notebook, and the more afraid I became the more I kept it closed, as if by doing so its contents might remain imperceptible or even disappear. But the more I carried it around the heavier it became, until the experience of carrying it had become so embedded in me that it was hard to tell whether it was its weight I was carrying around or mine. At the end of each day I’d lie on the chaise, angle the reading light down, pick up the notebook to read it, then put it down again because, having held it so constantly, my wrist ached.
Each day and into the next, it rained. Through the window the sea swelled and the boats looked small. Grasses slid down the mountain with so much earth attached to their roots that it seemed the mountain itself was disintegrating. There was something primitive about the rain. It made me want to see people or be with people. It wasn’t a calming rain, making uniform watery noises, it was a whipping rain that beat on the skylight and came in sideways through the glassless window. The newspaper showed flooded streets and floating cars. The story of the weather had become the story of the defences people constructed against it. The radio spoke about stocking cupboards with tins. Cartoon characters converted household items into flotation devices (the legs of the dining-room table are removed to become oars, the flat tabletop is a raft).
One day, as the afternoon neared its ending, with a vegetable soup on the stove, and the potatoes far from cooked, I went to the living room to read. I shut the door, sat down, covered myself with a blanket, picked up the notebook and might very well have put it down again when, because the binding was weak, a clump of pages fell out. The outermost page was a blank white expanse with no words for my thoughts or feelings to snag on, and I let my eyes wander up and down it as if at a strip of magnificent coastline. Overleaf were a few lines of Mim’s messy scrawl. Brace yourself, said Hannah Kallenbach. What was I afraid of? A letter, I suppose. Dearest Max, the letter might read, if you are reading this then I must be dead.
But the notebook didn’t contain notes about Mim, it contained notes about the sea. They weren’t written in full sentences but were phrases stacked up on top of each other like a poem. The sea is infinite, the sea is eternal, etc., nothing insightful, just the usual generalised observations people make about the sea. I turned the page and found more banal observations. So this is it, I thought. I can see why she hid this away. These are just the nonsense clichés which people have been making about the sea for centuries.
I thought about the kind of people who come to the sea to look at it, how they put themselves down on whatever rock or bench is around and gaze for hours into the distance as though something out there makes life seem meaningful, or at least less incomprehensible. What are they looking at? I asked myself. What do they see when they see the sea? Most people seemed to find the sea deeply interesting but it held no particular depth or virtue for me. The most profound effect the sea had on me was that sometimes, from the living-room window, it quite literally made me want to throw up. I’d always thought that people who liked the sea were people who didn’t like society, that it was people who’d failed in their relationships who turned to the sea. There was something in their glazed faces – leaning on harbour railings, walking along the crumbling promenade, staring over the tops of their newspapers – which disturbed me. It seemed they wanted to be immersed in it, that as they looked out at the sea they entered into a special relationship with it which, to a certain extent, entitled them to speak to it. Because people who spent too much time looking at the sea did start to commune with it, as if nature held the answer to all of life’s important questions, their expressions suggesting that they were not so much watching the sea as conversing with it. I could tell from the way they sat, dead still, that the sea spoke to them and that they, for their part, were receptive to its communication. But what was the sea saying to them? The sea didn’t speak to me. What do you say to them that you won’t say to me? I asked the sea, but the sea was silent and had no communication to make.
The sea glints, Mim had written. The sea seethes. In this vein were written an extraordinary number of pages. The sea is lonely and The sea is wide and The sea looks like the ridges on the palate of a person’s mouth. The sea sighs, she wrote, though it seemed to me that what the sea was really saying, if anything at all, was why, or who, or whywhywhy. It was apparent from the number of pages Mim had written, mottled with traces of her rubbings-out – the sea shivers, she’d written, no, quivers, no, shakes – that she’d watched the sea closely, methodically even, yet as the notebook progressed her notes said less and less about anything, everything just ended up as some metaphor to do with water. Sometimes, despite being neither forensic nor lively enough to be worth repeating, an observation would appear twice – that the sea was like sequins, for instance, or the metallic blue of the BMWs they used to use in road trip movies – which was discon
certing, breaking, as it did, the promise inherent in reading, that, line by line, as one thing leads to another, one is all the time going somewhere, that if one keeps going, one will eventually get somewhere, to some end or conclusion.
As the day wore on it became harder to read, not because I didn’t like what I read but because the clouds were dark and it was too dim to read without squinting. An image of Mim floated into my mind, clarifying for a second before it was swallowed up again. Sometimes I’d come into the laundry and find her sitting at the desk, her face whitened by the light from the computer screen. What are you doing? I’d ask, and she’d say, Nothing, though I could see from the reflection in the window behind her that she was playing solitaire. What did she see when she looked at the sea, I wondered. Perhaps it was just something to look at, said Hannah Kallenbach, a convenient place to rest her eyes. But why did she need to put it into words? It occurred to me that this business of writing things down must have mattered to Mim personally, that in among her thoughts about the sea must be other thoughts; that someone who fixed their eyes for hours and hours on something a thousand miles from nowhere, must find, after a while, that it was their own thoughts they came up against. But the more I read the less I understood, since as the notebook progressed, perhaps because her hand was tired, Mim’s handwriting loosened and the words began to lean away from me, as if hiding something. What are you looking at? they seemed to say. We’re just words! We don’t like being scrutinised in this way!
The point about the sea, it seemed, was not to look at it but to capture it somehow, to turn it into words the way a painter might fix the sea in variegated shades of blue or a composer might transcribe it into waveform music. So I went to the window to see for myself. The ocean looked exactly as I had expected it to look: vast and blue and boundless. What are you doing, asked Hannah Kallenbach, though being in my head, she must have understood without my having to explain. I scoured its surface for signs of life but apart from the odd seagull there was nothing to be found. I tracked the minute tide movements, trying to decipher the order underlying the fleeting patterns on its surface, which were always changing depending on where you focused your eyes. I opened the notebook and recorded my observations. Parts of it are clear, I wrote, others are scummy. It moves from the pavement to the horizon then back again. Some things get sucked beneath the surface while others stay floating on top of it. Then, because I didn’t know what I was doing, I closed the notebook. You want to see something, said Hannah Kallenbach. You want the sea to show you something and when it doesn’t you think it’s wasting your time. So it was that my first attempt to study the sea came to nothing.
OK, Mr Field Page 6