OK, Mr Field

by Katharine Kilalea

  Later, because I tried a second and third time, the experience was almost traumatic. My many vague thoughts masked one very clear one: there was simply too much of it. Just the idea of it filled my mind with inconceivably large numbers. In fact, I felt a strong temptation not to look at the sea, though I fixed my eyes on it anyway, as if by staring hard enough they might dip down a thousand yards and get to the bottom of whatever mystery lay beneath the gulls and dead leaves. But however hard I tried, I couldn’t see what you’re meant to see when you look at the sea. So, having dedicated myself for some time to observing the water, I came to the conclusion that nothing I could say about it was insightful.

  The rain stopped and I went up to the solarium. The sun came out from behind the clouds (the sun came out from behind the clouds, we say, though really it’s the clouds that are passing) but the paving had been sunk in water so long that it had lost its hardness and gone soft and almost woodlike. A crab scuttled out from under a flowerpot and darted away. I watched a municipal worker clearing leaves from the railway tracks, jumping back each time a train squeaked past. Fishermen bent over their hooks and tackle, so accustomed to the sea that they paid it no attention. Whereas from the living room the close-up view of the sea made it seem restless and constantly moving, from the solarium, seen in its entirety, it was obvious it wasn’t going anywhere. The sea twitches, I thought. Perhaps that’s why she watched it, without worrying, not even for an instant, about waking to find it gone from the bay. I zoomed out, letting my eyes relax until the sea beneath me was just a long blue line which, at a certain point, became the horizon. Nothing stood out. Nothing drew itself to my attention. In fact, the more I looked at the sea, the less I seemed to see it, and this special way of not looking produced a feeling in me that I was sort of there and sort of not there, a feeling which lasted for a few minutes until, because it troubled me, I wrote it down – There are times, I wrote, when I’m looking at sea and it’s all so dull I can hardly be sure I even exist – and felt myself again. I stand here thinking these strange philosophical thoughts, I wrote, and a sort of happiness came over me, or comfort maybe, as if there were suddenly two of us, as if my writing down my thoughts was away of keeping myself company.

  After half an hour or thereabouts the rain returned, a reprieve doubly cruel for its brevity, since there was neither enough time for the puddles to be reabsorbed into clouds nor for the sun to blast away all my thoughts. When I came downstairs, the phone was ringing. In all the months of living alone, I’d not gotten used to being alone. When the phone rang I couldn’t help hoping – just for a second while the caller’s identity was still unknown – that it was Mim calling, knowing at the same time that the moment I picked it up the disappointment would make my stomach drop as it does coming over a steep hill. When I picked up the phone, the line was quiet. Hello? It was a woman’s voice which eventually spoke. Hello? it said again because, perhaps since I’d not spoken to anyone for a long time, I’d forgotten to say something. Hannah Kallenbach’s voice was warm and soft but loud at the same time, as though amplified by its surroundings, like when someone is calling from a phone box. Are you OK? she said. I just wanted to find out how you were … How you are, I mean. The question gave me a strained feeling: like happiness, or sadness, or both (as if we’ve two different names for the same feeling), or maybe something else entirely which just shares their intensity. Oh, I said, thank you. Her voice lowered, taking on the kind of conspiratorial tone that suggests one is about to be let in on a secret. I was worried that the phones were down, she said, so I wouldn’t be able to reach you.

  The moment I put the phone down I lost all memory of the conversation. With it went the memory of everything that had happened around it, all of which disappeared the way that, when you wake up, you lose dreams. I tried to orient myself with questions like What day is it? or What was I saying five minutes ago? or Who was it I was talking to on the telephone? but couldn’t answer any of my questions so I stopped the test and tried to forget it too. My mind was blank apart from the word Hannah, which circled in my head like a trapped insect. Hannah. Like Mim, it read the same in both directions. Hannah, Hannah. I said it twice, as if to expel it by saying it out loud, then a third time because it was a pleasant sound, enveloping, with no harsh plosives for the tongue to trip over.

  That night, although I knew I was alone, I didn’t feel that I was alone. When I walked to and fro in the windowless room, the darkness turned the glass wall into a mirror so it looked like there were two of us walking in the room at the same time, the other following me like a double. And when I looked out at the invisible black sea, the lighthouse consoled me by casting its beam across the water, illuminating some gulls floating in the darkness. And later, when it was quiet and the restaurant music no longer echoed through the bay, the sea sound was like someone breathing in the room with me. I lay down and closed my eyes, feeling a clenching in my heart. Shaking my head from side to side, as if to refuse something, or to burrow my way into sleep, I caught myself muttering, Everything will be OK, everything will be OK in the end, without knowing why, as if somewhere inside, I knew that being asleep was more dangerous than being awake.

  Chapter 9

  The sun came out from

  behind the clouds, we say,

  though really it’s the clouds

  that are passing

  Morning arrived and I opened my eyes, pushing the notebook slowly to one side. It wasn’t light yet. I could measure the distance of things by their colour: those nearest were bright and vibrant; those furthest away were grey, as if covered in ash. It must be Sunday, I thought, because the building site was quiet. As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I saw Hannah Kallenbach leaning against the radiator, looking down on me with her special piercing gaze. What are you looking at? I said. And she said, I like watching you wake up. I like the way that, for a few moments, you’re OK. Because for a few moments everything was calm and then it began to shake. I thought there might have been an earth tremor, or that a washing machine somewhere was on spin cycle, but the glass of water beside my bed had no ripples on its surface. For a moment (since each night in dreams I reversed Mim’s leaving so that in the morning it happened all over again) I had the notion that the bed was moving because Mim was beside me, sobbing maybe, or masturbating. Then I heard the sounds of something dropping, and again the house shook as a crane offloaded a stack of bricks from a van parked on the street into a large metal skip. I couldn’t see the crane in its entirety, all I could see was the apex of its bent elbow as it lifted the bricks, swivelled, and released them with a loud crash.

  Gradually, the tower had begun to resolve itself into a form I could recognise. On top of the square podium the skeleton of the building had been erected – a dozen or so round floorplates supported by thin columns. There were no outer walls or windows yet, just these evenly spaced floorplates rising up around the large columns for the lift shafts, with staircases zigzagging between them. I could see the stairwells and the corridors, and the rooms leading off them. The electrics had gone in and bits of wiring poked from the where the plug sockets and light switches would be. Touw had arrived on site in a pair of maroon britches and leant a tall ladder against the wall of the apartment tower. He was fitting a bright-green flag onto a flagpole made from a piece of timber. TOUW STUDIO said the flag. MAKING EXTRAORDINARY PROJECTS HAPPEN! The builders, watching as he tightened the rope of the flag around the makeshift flagpole and, turning his hands, fastened it, looked to be experiencing collective bemusement.

  All the while, it rained. The sea was flinging up brown sand and lifeguards had raised red flags to keep surfers off the huge waves coming in, each one beginning almost before the previous one was over. In the months since I’d arrived, the building site had been animated by changing noises. In the early days, while the builders were breaking ground, I’d mostly heard loud drilling and jackhammers breaking up rocks. Then had come the peaceful time while the foundations were being laid, which in due cou
rse had given way to the construction stage, with contractors arriving on site each morning, each with a different job, making a different sound. Mostly there were delicate sounds – the fine metal sounds of a chain swinging, its links clashing in a metal chord; the even roar of an electric sanding machine – accompanied by the large, generous rumble of a concrete mixer. But sometimes, since I couldn’t always see which instrument or tool each sound corresponded to, I had to imagine a machine producing a tired squeal or one which emitted tapping sounds in such a quick rhythm that – in the same way as the multiple notes of a saw’s teeth sounding close together are identified simply as ‘sawing’ or the many incisions of a drill are just called ‘drilling’ – they merged into a single high-pitched whine. So that during the day, as I lay on the chaise, my thoughts were constantly being infiltrated by odd hypotheses. When, for instance, I heard stones knocking together, I pictured stones being cleaned in a large washing machine, and when I heard a metallic scratching sound, I pictured somebody sweeping the dirt with a metal-bristled broom, and when a faint whirring filled the air, I imagined that someone somewhere was grinding coffee or sharpening a pencil with an old electric pencil sharpener.

  What disturbed me, however, was not the mysteriousness of the individual sounds – which, in themselves, were not especially aggravating – but the sounds that the builders (more of whom arrived every day) made working simultaneously. Because although I knew that each of the builders was acting independently, oblivious of the others, I couldn’t help searching for some kind of synchronicity between them, as though, like an orchestra tuning up before a performance, their many tools were just warming up for the moment, always imminent, when they would come together into some kind of coherent organisation. My ears, unable to switch off this hope for the resolution the site seemed to be crying out for, were constantly alert for any regularity, believing always that a hammer striking (one, two, three – pause – one, two, three) might be counting the rest of the instruments into rhythm, or that some sonic coincidence, like the scrape of a spade running for a few seconds in parallel to the grating of a drill, signified something more. As though the bricklayer smoothing mortar and the roofer laying flashing and the plumber installing a pipe and the workman transferring gravel from something into something else were, all the time, on the verge of aligning themselves, of synchronising into some form which would reveal the underlying structure according to which the site was arranged.

  All day, I listened to the completely unpredictable orchestration of banging with a burning sensation in my chest. The lack of rhythm drove me nearly insane and I couldn’t wait for six o’clock when the mechanical sounds gave way to the human sounds of laughing and talking as the builders packed up and went into the corrugated hut to change clothes. But the moment the gate closed and its chain clinked shut, I regretted their departure since my ears, having listened with such attentiveness during the day, couldn’t switch off their sensitivity to each sound. Even when the world went quiet, they heard the smallest noise acutely. Especially at night. No sooner had I closed my eyes than my highly attuned ears would detect some sound – the creaking of a ventilator or my foot rubbing against the bed linen – which, like a conductor raising his hand, would draw in some other sounds, and then a whole host of sounds which during the day would have meant nothing to me, but in the dark, when it was hard to link the noise to the object it came from, seemed strange and sinister. However calm I felt when I lay down, within moments of switching off the light, my ear would fixate, for instance, on what sounded like two pieces of wood being knocked together, a sound which seemed so threatening that I’d stay dead still for minutes – hours, even – hardly breathing in case the air squeaking through my blocked sinuses alerted the intruder to my presence. Then the noise stopped. Then it started up again, only this time it seemed less like two pieces of wood knocking together than a thin piece of wood creaking, like a wooden clothes horse being folded away. For a moment I felt relieved – it was just someone folding laundry. But of course it couldn’t be a clothes horse because why would an intruder be folding a clothes horse, and in any case, I didn’t have a clothes horse, I hung the washing over a cable strung between two trees. It was as though the inner membrane of my ear had been worn away. Sometimes I even took the sound of my own breathing for the sound of an intruder’s footsteps dragging their way along the corridor towards me. And at those times, above all, I missed Mim. I longed to be able to turn over and know by her unchanged breathing or the calm expression on her sleeping face that whatever rustling or scraping had frightened me didn’t worry her, so there was nothing for me to worry about either. What are you so afraid of? I’d comfort myself, trying not to respond to every noise that came out of the dark with a paranoid start. There’s nothing to worry about. But when, in the middle of the night, a sound emerged from the darkness, it was so alarming that I’d jump out of bed, convinced that I was not alone – those are definitely footsteps! – and rush to the window only to fasten my eyes onto complete blackness. For a moment I would hear something, a scratching for instance, as though somebody – an archaeologist? – were chiselling away at the mountain, and I’d say, Hello?, then, suddenly timid, Hello? again, picturing whoever was out there staring back up at me.

  Even when I fell asleep my ears, like two sentries guarding me overnight, stayed open. So it would happen sometimes that long after midnight, in the time of deepest sleep, I would wake because someone was calling for me, or not calling for me so much as calling out my name with a rising inflection, the way someone hearing a noise when they think they are alone calls out Hello? I’d try to ignore the sound – it wasn’t Mim, I told myself, of course not – and although I knew it was just a dream, I couldn’t help believing that it might be her, that she might be downstairs, standing at the door calling for me, waiting for my reply. Despite myself, I’d lie there, making not the slightest movement, in case she called again, sometimes even responding with my own Hello? and lifting my head from the pillow in the hope that something other than the ticking of my watch could be heard on the other side of the room. Then I’d fall asleep again, but too soon, before the dream had been fully blown away by wakefulness, so that sometimes Mim’s presence remained and I’d wake again during the night to feel her prodding my shoulder. I must be snoring, I’d think, rolling over, but her hand would keep up its prodding until I opened my eyes and found a dark shape standing over me. What are you doing? I’d say, and when she didn’t reply, I’d try to shush myself back to sleep – Ssh, I’d say, Ssh, ssh, you’re dreaming, it’s just a dream – but nothing my eyes told me as they grew accustomed to the dark erased the feeling of dread in my heart.

  It rained for days, for weeks, each daily outpouring coming more voluminously from the clouds than the last. The rain had breached the boundaries of the house. It came in through the glassless window of the living room and through the corners of the ceiling where the flat roof was improperly sealed. Damp rose on the walls of the entrance hall where the foundations were too shallowly laid and filtered into the upstairs walls where water had penetrated the facade. The roof had become a breeding ground for mosquitoes. Clouds of them drifted into the living room, where the atmosphere was better for living. They surrounded me so that it felt like I was being tried by a council of mosquitoes – What is he waiting for? they said. He must be waiting for something, something in particular.

  Before long, the tea-coloured stains began to leak and I arranged a number of saucepans under the ceiling so there were now a variety of places around the house which produced a regular rhythm as heavy raindrops fell into the metal pots. The dripping sound had the opposite effect to the unpredictable orchestration of the building site. Where the noises from outside were so irregular that I was constantly being alerted to their presence, the water falling into the pots, tempered as it was by the many layers of roofing and ceiling materials, was so evenly distributed that it had a reliable beat and my mind soon grew accustomed to its presence. The enduringly u
niform tempo of the rain dripping into the house provided me with a sense of security. Hearing it, like a baby soothed by a ticking clock, I felt reassured, both of the rhythm’s own constancy and of the house’s ability to protect me. Since the rhythm, which stood in counterpoint to the chaos outside and the vagaries of the rain (which raged against the skylight, settling into a beat for a moment or two only before the wind changed direction and it became unfamiliar again), distinguished inside from out, giving the impression, so seldom experienced anymore in the house, that being inside meant being separate from the outside world, so the experience of the rain, from inside, was detached: I could sit there and watch it like a film about rain.

  For days the urge to play the piano had found outlet in a constant foot-tapping and teeth-chattering and pressing of fingers against thighs. Now I sat down at the piano. Chopin’s Preludes fell open, out of habit, on the Raindrop Prelude. The ivory keys were brown around the edges and the fingering pencilled into the score had faded but my hands remembered where to go, the right hand carrying in the melody, the left coming down repeatedly on the A flat which runs throughout the piece. My hands were cold – a luminous, bloodless yellow – and however hard I tried, my left wrist kept collapsing. The little bird! I’d remind myself, because my Russian piano teacher had told me to keep my wrist high up as though cradling a bird’s egg beneath the palm of my hand, but it was no good, the muscles had atrophied since the accident and didn’t have the strength to hold it for very long.