Except Minto.
Minto was sitting on the black sofa in the living room. I eyed him, he clocked me.
‘Hallo again my dears,’ he said, and ran his fingers through his white hair. I almost turned around to see the person he was also addressing – but again, no one, but not and entirely no one. I thought about laughing and wiped my eyes – sat on another chair. The television was on with no sound, set to a documentary about the deep sea. Small frilled things frisked across blackness. Minto, for his part, was dressed in a summery-looking suit with a huge camel-coloured coat over the top of it, and at least three scarves, all of different red shades. He had fingerless gloves on – I marvelled at those. The last time I’d seen fingerless gloves was in a Dickens adaptation. He had painted his nails matte white, perhaps with correction fluid. I realised it was pretty obvious that I had been crying. My face felt red and raw from my outburst earlier and worse, Minto may have heard it, the sobs I mean. Even someone as strangely removed as he is had noticed. But Minto was only looking at the television – perhaps he had seen but perhaps also he had never paid much attention to anything.
‘They’re getting worried about you, you know,’ he said.
An Interesting Discussion
At first neither of us said anything else. A large van rumbled, beeping down the street and in its wake, seagulls crying. A beautiful smell filled the air – some kind of cologne he was wearing. It smelled like the woods in summertime, green and fresh. I’d assumed he would smell musty, like the old shut-in he was. The cologne made me more curious. If he was able to put on cologne maybe he was able to make other kinds of choices about his life. Maybe he was not the old kook I thought.
‘You mentioned last time that you saw someone else with me,’ I said.
He looked up and smiled kindly. ‘Yes, this young man here,’ he said in a reedy voice, gesturing at the space beside me where a small table held a lamp.
‘Well, the thing is,’ I said, ‘I’m struggling to picture him. Bad eyes, you know. Could you tell me what he looks like?’
‘Come, don’t condescend. But I’d be glad to, be glad to. If there is honesty in your heart! He’s quite short, yes, with dark hair that’s very thick. He looks awfully familiar – and he’s dressed for a party. I mean, a costume party.’
‘A costume party?’
‘Nineteenth century servant clothing, with breeks and shirt. Some kind of pastoral theme. I’d say he’s just about to put on a mask, and mingle with his betters.’
He paused as the television showed a coral reef, darting yellow fish.
‘Oh, you know who he looks like? Our other houseguest.’
‘Daniel?’
‘Is that his name? I can’t keep track you know. They come and go, ebb and flow. Like tidal creatures. I love them all, even the naughty ones who don’t pay their bills and do a flit into the night. There’s always some reason for that,’ he said, looking at the space to my left. ‘We should never judge someone’s actions too severely, if it does no real harm to anybody.’
‘Minto,’ I asked, ‘I hope you don’t mind if I call you Minto?’
He folded his hands and nodded, smiling again. ‘Nobody calls me anything else these days.’
‘How,’ I asked, ‘how can I make this other guest more comfortable? It’s just – he’s always with me, I think. But I don’t really know what he wants.’
‘Och, I think he should tell you himself what he wants,’ Minto said.
‘I’m so tired,’ I said to myself.
‘Then that’s a sign you should be resting more than you are,’ he replied. ‘You’re wasting your good looks, and it’s a national tragedy.’
Presentation
When I didn’t say anything, he went on. ‘Now, the thing about your guest is, he’s the sort who got me into trouble back in my younger days. Just after my wife – you know, at the university, in the hall when I took tours, I was a fair public speaker then and the stories amused until, well – admin changes, a brisk new air comes in and the faculty start to talk – I made too many of the others alarmed, and they needn’t have been. I told them who and what, the old desks and the furled beasts sitting on them, the room with the cold always in it was from the ladies, you see – but nobody wanted to be told that. I had to get the train up every day for the commute, and the bus. And trains are full of that sort. Buses less so – but you see them, sometimes, from the windows – standing mournfully in the fields, resting on old ploughs, pipe smoke, staring at me as I rushed past, since they always seem to sense it – too long without the human kindnesses, I think . . .’ He trailed off. ‘I used to scream and shout and get all red in the face. I used to write to people, ‘What’s this all about, please help me, I will kill myself if I can’t find the solution.’ Well, that all falls away, eventually. Madness, they said. Lots of small pills and time on the West Sands walking Bonxie. By the time I’d settled in for the hard weather and grown to like it, you know, I would even wish I could have made a decent career out of it, become an expert, but there’s no legitimacy in that area of study. I’ve read an inordinate number of books and I can tell you, there are too many cranks. Their own worst enemies, some folk. Too little rigour of testing and analysis. I was always for hard science where it needed to be, with a coat of softness for palatability, not the other way around . . .’
He trailed off again. In the silence I got up and made us tea. He held the mug in his red hands, wincing a little.
‘It’s not for me to go and change an entire discipline, or create some kind of hybrid new one. I see that now. And early retirement, and tea on the train up there for the last time, I spilled all over my nice white shirt. Piteous looks at my final address to students – ah well, all behind me now. You see I have no bitterness, not at all. I just need to be quieter, more than I am, cautious towards anyone who might not understand. That’s why there are always ones like you in the house, sort of a reassurance. Very kind of Badr to go and get you for me. Ah, but I’m off on a tangent now. I go on a bit. Sorry. Not so used to talking and it all comes out in a dramatic monologue. What did you ask me again?
‘About the other one.’
‘Mm,’ he said. ‘He wants to tell you something terribly important. But he looks like the kind of man who struggled to speak all his days. I had lots of students like that. If only there was such a thing as patience in this day and age. But while we have made many advances, that has become quite old fashioned.’
He sipped his tea. ‘It doesn’t tell you a thing about his character, mind you, the shyness. Did I ever tell you about the time I threw a desk out the window? Only a small one. It killed a man walking below in the street.’
Finding
I went to my room and got ready to go out. I was going to take the diary to Mark, I fully intended it. But first I needed to go somewhere where no one else was and clear my brain and work out – the right thing to say. The thing that would not make Mark believe I was insane – it could get back to Cloudberry, easily. It could do any number of things to harm my career. I would not like to find myself turning into a Minto before the age of thirty.
I would ask him about his cologne another time. It was really very nice.
Tears in my eyes again as I put fresh gym gear in the bag. Why? I yelled out a little noise of frustration as I packed. Mrs Boobs looked up from me from the bed with eyes so wide I apologised.
I walked out the house and headed for my car. I needed rolling fields, oak trees and little rush-lined ponds. I needed acreages of black and white cows and honey-coloured stone. I needed peace and truth and order. All of this was a little hard to get in this far part of the north and in this season of dying. I drove out anyway, heading in the direction of Ayrshire, though I’d never been – I dimly knew there were milk cows there, close enough – sixty on the country roads, nothing coming in the opposite lane, a roundabout by a woodside development, and blinking, there were fields, laid out stripped to stubble as they were. Somewhere about an hour south of Edinb
urgh I spotted a small river with trees along it and feeling tired decided it would be fine. I parked up at the side of the road.
He would come, I was sure. Any part where there were fewer people, in a landscape he felt comfortable in. I called him only ‘him’ in my mind. So far he had been James, but he was also Daniel, or Daniel-like, or ghost, or a singular hallucination from sleep deprivation, somehow shared with Minto, or indulged in by him – he had known the figure was there before I had, hadn’t he? I thought – he made me think of him, the bastard. And now I was stuck with him. But I didn’t have to be. You just have to face these things. I had the diary in my hand and I was walking in a field down to the river, just as I had the day before – or was it longer – walked down to the river. Where that first river had been shallow and broad, dark under a deep infinite dark, and biting cold, this river was grey-green, deep and narrow, fringed with leaves and grasses, those tall plants that have an umbrella of white flowers in summer had left their skeletons to wave in the damp breeze. I saw a brown shelf of mushroom on the skinny stump of a tree. I saw crows walking in the fields beyond the river. Out of a patchy blue sky sparks of snow were falling.
I got to the riverbank and I stood close to the edge. It was too wet for sitting. I waited and thought I should look at my phone, but then, that looking at my phone might make me seem distracted and uninterested. I wondered what rituals were needed to summon a person perhaps caused by – causing – a breakdown in the normal order of my life. I thought about how to punch him; I had the feeling if I tried he would stop being incorporeal. I pictured giving a black eye to a ghost. I’m not ashamed to say it now. I’m hungry – wait.
Okay.
I opened the book. Some flap on the edge of it was loose and I worried it with my fingernails. Stopped because it was an old book, and didn’t need my help getting more worn. Then – I heard it—
James, came the whisper, so quiet – I had dreamed it. I had mistaken the wind for it. I did not move; the wind in channels ran around me.
There was a bang, a metallic dunt, and I dropped the book.
Someone had hit my car. I could see them out of theirs, looking around. I ducked. The book – the diary – it was in the water, sinking. I grabbed it, nearly falling. My arm covered in slimy water, my fingers feeling of nothing, my heart contracting to a blip. But I had it – I pulled it out.
The book was not totally soaked. I looked around one last time, and there was nothing, no second car, not even crows near me. Nothing wanted me except to torment me.
Nothing made sense. I was feeling faint with the cold and the shock. I was sweating and swearing – I clambered back to the car, slipping on the wet grass, and my car had a smack in the rear bumper, but no terrible damage – lights all present – I shuddered and got back in, and drove home, slowly, with the sense that the world was full of figures watching me from the countryside, disinterested, leaning on farming equipment or staring out from the windows of the old cottage rows. I don’t know if I saw them or if Minto saw them through me or if I had fallen asleep at the wheel and dreamed my way through them, the overlap of dreams and actual progress home. I was fierce though, and my body digested the shock. By the time I came home and washed my hands and dried the book in the oven and sat with it again at the kitchen table, no one could have told whether I’d moved all day or not, or even guessed that I’d almost lost it – the diary – not so many hours ago.
Katabasis
I could hear the city around me as Órla dragged me through it, though what I or she said to one another I couldn’t say. The sky was this grimy pale gold, while, I kept thinking, the night is like two hands about to snap – closed to crush us between them – any minute now. I had trouble swallowing, I had a pressure behind my eyes and it felt like I had a sinus infection. Now, thinking, I suppose I was panicking, a little. I had the diary in the pocket closest to my heart, like a Romantic. I kept raising my hand to touch my pocket unthinkingly until I made myself stop. Just because I had almost lost the book didn’t mean I would again.
‘It’s sunset,’ I was saying, but Órla wasn’t listening. We were on the long downward slope heading towards the MacAshfall place. I forget who decided we should walk there, however long it took, but it was good exercise – I couldn’t remember the last time I’d gone to the gym perhaps Monday? What day was that? Or this? It’s not like an inner ear thing, to know the schedule, it’s okay to lose track sometimes. I had already decided it didn’t matter to know my place in the world as much as to convince others I did, while I busied myself with this other more important work. What was the important work? I was so determined then – going so fast. Towards some goal. Man in the river. Pages with the gleam of a knife. My whole life up until that point – but if I kept going, I didn’t have to be afraid.
I almost whacked an old woman in the face with my shoulder, my suit tails whipping behind me. We were late by then, Órla said. But the night would be good, I thought. The finality of a phase approaching. Very soon I would be handing the diary over to Mark and telling him what I had found, which was that – what? Ghostly figures. The silhouette of someone against the sun. I knew almost nothing, at that point. I felt buoyed too, seeing Órla energised like this to take me to the house where I could unburden myself of this thing, share, with the one person who might understand, the story of all that I’d found and got carried away into. To make it stop, if it could be. It meant perhaps our cycles – I mean Órla’s and mine – were aligned and would continue longer. I felt like I could do with her, like a stabilising wheel.
‘Where on earth did you disappear off to?’ she said, walking ahead of me, backwards. ‘Are we talking about this?’ Sharp like a bird crying. I would try to listen, I thought, indulgently.
‘I’m sorry about this, Órla,’ I said. ‘I had to go and clear my head. I hadn’t slept well.’
‘I mean, I get that – it’s just, you seem a little – ’
‘Yeah, I’ve not been sleeping – I’ve been having the weirdest dreams. And you went off somewhere and I – I decided not to just sit and feel sorry for myself. I went out with some friends and lost track of time. I slept on a sofa. A leather sofa,’ I smiled, I rubbed my lips, which were dry. ‘I felt rubbish when I came back. I got rained on. Got myself soaked. I didn’t think you’d spend the night at mine, and then when you had I felt guilty – and – ’
‘What else, Tom?’
‘What else what?’
She would either know the truth somehow, or she wouldn’t. That’s what I thought. She would see I was concealing this great story behind the lies. It hadn’t rained for some time. The river. The ghostly people in the fields sending up smoke lines that no one saw. The lies were all there to make a web of constructions indicating what had actually happened. If she could read in between, then I’d know. A tram gave its strange echoing ding; the greyish department store on the corner was leaking people like blood. A lowering grimy light, my beautiful clothing glowed and hers was crisp and black. We had slowed, we briefly held hands. We were young and light, we understood. We sped past a patisserie and a jeweller’s. This part of town was smart and we were heading towards the future. I tapped my jacket again for the book, to feel it comforting and waiting there.
Through
As we walked the crowd thinned, and then we were on a bridge across a gap in the city where the river flowed far below. I stopped part way, unable to go any further, struck with the knowledge of an action repeated before: crossing the river. Though at this time at a great height – the bridge fell away on either side for thirty feet at least. But I was flying over it. I had to look down and see if he was there. If I was there next to him. I had stopped to look. I asked to borrow Órla’s lip balm. My lips were fine but I needed to plant my feet down, there above the great hollow in the air. It struck me I didn’t have a plan for what to say to Mark when I saw him again.
‘What else were you feeling when you saw me?’ Órla said. She must have said other things that I’d misse
d. ‘Cos I think you were going to say, and forgive me if I’m wrong – jealous.’
‘Jealous?’ I tried to work out what she was referring to. I leaned over the wall, locating some trees, yellow and red as a fire, and used them to ground my vision. I rubbed my face, and the leaves on the trees seemed to crackle and disperse into the air. I gave a hard sniff.
‘Conflicted then,’ She must mean the morning. That morning? A morning? All the mornings stretched back along the riverbank behind us, every morning that had existed since the city was built alongside it and overhead. The setting sun glinted on three hundred years of mornings. And I had a flash of the man, who had Daniel’s face and Daniel’s slight, compact body – working away at the banks of a river – I thought fishing. I almost called down to him. I hoped he was warmer now. Tying some wire around his hands, threading a needle – Órla meant the morning when she and Daniel and I had breakfast together. I must have seemed cold to her.
‘What were you up to with Daniel, if I should have been feeling jealous?’ I said.
I was speaking mechanically. Staring out across time, across the chasm of time. Alongside a field of green corn, James Lennoxlove was rushing on his horse, with their long shadow cast over it. A haze of morning mist swirling with autumn leaves broken up to particles. The accounts to be read. He pulled sharp on the reins. Down to the river he rode instead, where we would meet. I saw from a distance the white of his eye, looking for mine.
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