— I asked of course. After some time. I can’t remember how long. He was devastated. He thought he’d killed Robert, that he was responsible. And at first I thought that it was the trauma that prevented him telling me. The way you might not want to speak about the details of an accident. He wouldn’t say, and in the grief of that time, in his despair, I knew that perhaps it was very difficult for him to say the words, those words which the last time they had been uttered had caused a death. To say them again to me. But I asked him again, later, after a few weeks. He couldn’t tell me. He told me he was afraid that I would laugh, and that if I laughed my laugh would somehow echo or recreate Robert’s laugh, and that something terrible would happen. He was pale when he said this. Pale, shaking. And then he said that he was even more worried that I wouldn’t laugh. That I would not think it funny, that I would think it a stupid joke. That I would think that he had killed my husband for nothing, for a stupidity, for a joke that could barely be thought of as a joke. That Robert’s death would be worthless if it was in response to a worthless joke. He told me this, his hands trembling, pale. Consumed by despair.
She looked out of the window again and her face was almost smiling.
— He was dead within a year. He went back to drinking. He travelled, strangely, haphazardly, with no apparent reason. I think he was simply spending his money. He would fly to Germany or to Mexico, stay away for weeks, living in expensive hotels. Drinking. He would write letters to friends. Not to me. I think he was trying, sometimes I think he was trying to find a joke. A joke good enough to die for. And if he found it he would come back and tell me, lie to me, that it was the joke he had told Robert. But he never came back. He died in a hotel in Istanbul.
She smiled fully. The little scar or wart by her eye seemed more visible now, as if the light had changed. Maria tried not to look at it. She was exhausted by the job of listening. She felt at once that this was fascinating, and interesting, that it was something of a privilege to be trusted with it, and also that there was something wrong about it all, something that wasn’t entirely decent.
— So there you are, smiled Mrs Grant. But what about you? Tell me about you.
She cycled slowly though the traffic and her thinking was stalled. She could not gather up whatever it is that makes an idea. There seemed to be none of the material of memory available to her. As if she had met no one at all, or Mrs Grant had met no one at all.
Maria had looked at her, vacant, remembering suddenly that this was a conversation. And had said nothing much more than that she lived with her boyfriend in a terrible flat, she had no money and was very tired, and that she had to go home. Mrs Grant had seemed very mildly annoyed. She had sighed and looked at her phone and said something about going to a friend’s place in Battersea. It was as if she was used to being disappointed by people who had nothing to say for themselves.
In the flat Maria opened all the windows and then lay on the bed for a while. When she got up and walked into the kitchen the rat was on the sideboard, looking at her. She was almost certain that it was the same rat. A long-bodied rat, an old crafty rat, a mother and a biter and a teller of jokes. She looked at Maria and chewed, looked and chewed, looked and chewed.
— Get the fuck out of my kitchen you absolute fucking cunt, Maria said, calmly, evenly, her eyes on her eyes. Then she took a step forward. When she spoke again it was louder.
— Get. Out. Of. My. Kitchen.
She stared into the tiny reddened eyes, two punctures in the world, behind which there seemed to be nothing but a mechanical darkness, a machine, snickering on death. The rat stopped chewing. Maria shouted as loudly as she could and her voice came from somewhere she had not realised existed.
— GET OUT YOU FUCKING CUNT GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT
The rat froze, drew back, moved to the side, moved again, and then with a speed that shocked Maria, ran or jumped or flew through the open window and was gone.
She slammed the window shut. She ran around the flat slamming all the windows shut. She sprayed every kitchen surface with disinfectant and wiped it down, and then did it again, and she washed every piece of cutlery that had been in the jar by the sink, and she washed the jar, and she washed the windowsill and the window and the floor and the wall in the corner where she found that the toaster had paw prints on its side, as if the rat had lifted it to get at the crumbs underneath. She threw it out. And she threw out the cloths she had been using, and the rubber gloves, and she told Stan when he came home that the toaster was broken and they needed a new one and that she had cleaned the kitchen because she was bored, and that Mrs Grant had been self-obsessed and weird, and that she was in a terrible fucking mood and she was going out for a cycle.
— Ok, he said. Ok.
She went to Burgess Park and sat staring into the lake, which is not a lake, it is a pond, no more than three feet deep, and on its surface floated the reflection of a single structure so vast that it obscured the falling sun and glowed like a city on fire.
Mrs Ferrier was picking books off the floor.
— What happened?
— Oh a boy was upset, it’s all right. He pushed them off the table.
— Here, let me.
— Thank you Maria. I don’t know what got into him. He was sitting there working for a while and then he just became furious, swept the books off the table and stormed out.
— Brat.
— Oh it’s stress. He shouted sorry from the door. An angry sorry, but a sorry nonetheless. They have so much pressure put on them. I know you think they’re all spoiled and you’re right of course, but they don’t know that. Not yet. They think it really will be the end of the world if they don’t get to go skiing at Christmas.
— Skiing?
— Don’t put them on the returns trolley. Some of them might be checked out. I heard another couple of boys talking about a holiday in Italy. And one of them said it depended on his term report. Whether he could go.
Maria laughed. She had never been to Italy. She collected the books and put them on the counter and began looking them up.
— How was your coffee with Anna Grant?
She felt a flash of annoyance and turned and looked at Ferrier, who was smiling.
— She told me she was meeting you. Yesterday in the common room. First time she’s spoken to me in years. Wanted to know what you were interested in. I suspect she was worried you’d have nothing in common.
— Well. It was . . . she talks a lot.
— Yes?
— It was nice. She told me about her husband though, the death of her husband. Such a terrible thing.
Mrs Ferrier looked at Maria for a moment. Nodded. She picked up her pen again, and continued whatever she was doing. Nothing was said. Maria looked through the window to the playing fields where two girls seemed to be dancing. Or just messing about. Running. Jumping.
— I hadn’t realised she was French.
Mrs Ferrier put the pen down again.
— She isn’t French, Maria.
Ah. There.
— She isn’t?
— No. She’s from the south coast somewhere. Poole I think. And as far as I know she has never been married.
The girls on the playing field were lying on the grass. Maria breathed. Coughed.
— Well, perhaps I misunderstood.
— She is a terrible liar. I mean. She really is. There’s something wrong with her.
Yes, Maria thought. Probably.
Later on Ferrier used a soft voice that Maria had never heard before.
— There is virtually no one on the staff who hasn’t been taken in at some point. She spins yarns, and it’s wrong. She’s embarrassed people. But really she is the one who should be embarrassed. She should be ashamed actually Maria. Really.
And she touched Maria on the arm with what she must have thought was kindness.
She cycled up the hill and her legs didn’t hurt, but she could not fire up any anger. It did not seem to be there. Her body was too fit. She wanted to sleep but she knew it wouldn’t let her. She took a detour down to Deptford and looked at the Thames. She went to Rotherhithe and cut back to the Old Kent Road through streets she didn’t know, trying half-heartedly to get lost. Perhaps Ferrier was the one who was lying. Perhaps that. One or the other of them, entertaining themselves, and how was she to know? And what was wrong with it anyway? Making things up and saying them and making a world out of that. What was wrong with it?
The sky paraded overhead and the planes roared through it, tiny little interlopers. All that human achievement.
Something was wrong with it.
She dreamed one night of strawberries. They were huge and she could not bite them or fit them whole into her mouth so she left them where they were and was puzzled at what was denied her. When she woke she wrote a paragraph about a woman who finds some strawberries that are too big to eat. Her dream was softly odd and liquid and it flooded her, and her paragraph was a blotted box of basic cogs that made her furious and tired.
She texted Anna Grant.
Why did you lie to me?
There was no reply. But their eyes met in a corridor at the end of the day, and Maria tried to kill her with a look, and nearly broke the bike getting home. She felt the vibration of the text as she turned off Camberwell Green. She tried to ignore it, but there was nothing in the flat to distract her.
I just like to entertain.
Stan had some sort of problem with Gary that she couldn’t really understand. Photographs, which Gary had put through the letter box. Stan seemed to think this was an affront. She didn’t know why. They were like an old married couple, Stan and Gary. They had a childhood loyalty that had outlived their friendship and Maria had long thought they should call it a day, even if she liked Gary a great deal. But Stan increasingly seemed to annoy him, and she could feel Stan’s discomfort whenever Gary’s name came up.
She told him to go and talk to Gary if it was bothering him so much, and he did, and she had fallen asleep still waiting to hear him come in. In the morning, after a brief panic, she found him on the sofa. Only her brother and Stan when he was drunk slept on the sofa. Her brother looked like an angel, but Stan looked like a heap of clammy sorrow. She left without breakfast and got an apple on the way.
That evening when she asked, he said that Gary was using again.
— Using what?
— I don’t know. But he was obviously high. I’m not going to see him for a while.
— Is he ok?
— Yes he’s fine. Staying at his mother’s. But, you know, he was just . . . the way he’s behaving just isn’t acceptable really. Some of the things he was saying. He’s an angry guy. And taking it out on his friends is not . . . it’s not funny, it’s not right, it’s not what you do. He should know that it’s not what you do.
He wouldn’t tell her the details. Some dumb omerta of their schooldays. He wouldn’t even look at her. Why had he stayed out getting drunk? No answer. Because he was sad about his friend? Why not say so? He couldn’t.
In bed she pretended to sleep and the glow of his phone and the heat of his body pushed her towards the broken window. Something was wrong with her life. It was misdirected.
She thought she should text Gary. Make sure he was ok. Her brother the same. All these men with their unsubtle ghosts. Maybe it was them. She thought also, specks against her great confusion, about love, and secrets, and loyalty. She thought that it was probably, all of it, made up. And she thought that from the edge of her bed to the wood in the window was as much as she could manage. That everything else is the world. And the world has no paths. And nothing can make them. And that we are no more than interlopers here.
Am I forgiven? Anna Grant had asked. And Maria had not known how to reply.
In the morning she was up first again, while Stan slept on. She showered. When she went back into their room it smelled bad, and she dressed quickly. She left the bedroom door open. She left the kitchen door open. She stood for a moment and looked at the window. The kitchen window. Then she opened it. And she left for work.
Five minutes later she came back. He was still asleep. She closed the kitchen window and left again.
The Story
— There’s a story that my grandfather used to tell me. He had been a sailor — on trawlers first off . . . Brittany, battling the . . . Atlantic. Though he didn’t like fish. Then on cargo vessels all over the world; then finally, unhappily, on a ferry between . . . a ferry on the Channel.
— La sleeve.
— The sleeve, yes. He liked being on the sea, but he loved to be on the ocean. He thought the ocean was the stuff of the planet itself, and he was in awe of it, and it nourished him. Land was small and dreary and cut up. And he seemed genuinely to not understand how anybody could accept that a border was a real thing. It was an absurdity. He railed against borders. Stupid doodles on the world. Anyway, the story he told me was about a border. He was helping some people cross it. The details were always vague. A small boat, a foggy becalmed sea, a group of frightened refugees or fugitives approaching the coast in complete silence, waiting for the sound of a bell to guide them to safety. My grandfather was tense, standing up in the prow, not able to see the hand at the end of his outstretched arm. There was no bell. Someone whimpered and was quietened. A cough was smothered in gloved hands. The distant shush of a rippled beach. And then a single low tone, far off but clear. A bell. My grandfather turned his head and held his breath and just as his lungs began to fail it rang again. They made for it, navigating by ear, slightly to port, straight ahead. The encouraging bell. And then. Then there was a second bell. Another bell, a different one. A single low tone, far off but clear, slightly different to the first. A different direction. A different bell. Oars were lifted and the sailors huddled and conferred. My grandfather was new to this, but the others weren’t, and they were in no doubt. They turned around. They headed back the way they’d come, carefully, slowly, grimly, shrugging off the increasingly desperate pleadings of their passengers. Not tonight. Another night.
She takes a sip of her wine.
— We are, my grandfather told me, surrounded by traps.
— Which grandfather was this?
— I haven’t yet decided.
— A different one.
— A different one.
— Can they navigate by sound? In the darkness? Ships? Boats? Does sound not turn around on them? Would they not use lights?
She puts her fingers on the base of her glass and looks up over the rows of bottles to the patch of empty wall beneath the ceiling. Then she turns and looks at him.
— Foghorns, Yves.
He considers that.
— Fair enough. Foghorns. Yes. I still think. It wouldn’t suffer by the replacement of the bell. Beacons maybe. Lights in the darkness, just as thrilling.
— No. I like the bell. I like the sound of the bell.
— Fair enough.
— We are surrounded by traps. Appealing little noises in the darkness. They sound like signals. They draw us in.
— Very good.
They are at the bar in The Arms. They sit at the end, at the wall that divides the front bar from the back, they being in the front, next to the archway, perched on stools, Yves leaning against the panelling, looking at the side of Anna’s head, and past it to the rest of the front bar, which is almost empty, except for people. Yves is the same man that Stan calls Stoker and Gary calls Yan, or Yanko. Anna is the woman Maria thinks of as Mrs Grant. She is Anna Grant.
— Who did you meet? asks Yves.
— No one.
— I met a man from Colombia.
— Was he an interesting man?
— He was. He was interesting. Melancholy. I told him the
story of the wretched woman and he told me a story of a mountain.
— Which wretched woman?
— The woman in the wall.
— I don’t know that.
— Which first?
She takes a sip of her wine. Her bracelet slips along her wrist.
— The mountain.
— There is a mountain in Colombia. There is a sparrow there, a small bird, some sort of small bird, which is called the Heart of Jesus. But in Spanish. What is that in Spanish?
— Le coeur de
— Anna that’s French.
— Oh Spanish. I’ll have to look.
She takes out her phone.
— Go on anyway, she said.
— This bird is peculiar to the region, or this variety of this bird in any case, is peculiar to the region. Certainly in its behaviour it is peculiar to the region. When the Spanish arrived and one or some of them got it in their heads to climb the mountain, they would find the little corpses of this bird scattered near the summit, and the locals, the indigenous people, told them that
— El corazon de Jesus.
— That’s it. But the local people, the indigenous people had another name for it of course in their own language, but anyway. They told the Spanish that this bird died because it kept trying to fly to the sun, and it would fly too high, and its heart would burst, and down it would fall, dead. And that is why there were so many little bird corpses on the summit, and near the summit, and the Spanish named the bird El cortisone
— El corazon de Jesus.
— That’s it. And the scientific amongst them wondered if a bird could get high enough into thin air in order to kill itself, and apparently there were papers written and philosophical Spanish gentlemen who pondered this a long time, this question, and wondered what it could mean, and wondered too if the echoes of the story of the Greek boy
— Icarus.
— That one. They wondered how these local, to their minds, savages, could have heard that story, and wondered if the Greeks had been there, and wondered if perhaps all the world’s people came from the same original story, but of course that would have been a dangerous thought to have, given that they were killing these beautiful people left right and centre for their gold and with the declared justification that they were not worth a damn one way or another, and do you know this isn’t even the start of the story, this is all just preamble Anna, I haven’t even got to the start of it yet.
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