After lunch Grandpa talked a bit about kittens, and then patted the sofa next to him.
‘Come and sit down with me here, I’ve got a bad back from digging the garden over. You’ve always been a strong lad – what about a back rub for your old grandpa?’
I didn’t feel it coming, I only heard it, a sort of noise that was made up of all the times with Grandpa when he was teaching me lessons, and yesterday in the park, and my routine changing – they all burst out of me, and I could hear myself from far away, screeching and crying, my eyes balled up and my hands tight, on the very tips of my toes.
I had never seen my grandpa look scared, but he did then. He got up, and backed towards the door, shouting, and I could hear him through my own noise. ‘Calm down! I only asked for a back rub – what’s the matter with you? Bloody retard, scared the shit out of me. I’ll be back with a kitten and see if that calms you down, you freak. After everything I’ve done for you, ungrateful bastard. You think you’re normal, do you, screeching like a fucking banshee. Normal people have jobs, did you ever think about that? Independent my ass. Your life is a joke.’
He could say what he liked: my reaction had scared him and I thought he seemed smaller and not so wise. I would show him: I would try the cat and try and get a job – anything to stop the games and not go home to him or my mother.
I heard the door slam and slowly my noise died away. He was gone and another thing had changed. I had changed things two days in a row and I felt as if I was making progress, but it also made me scared and very unsure what would happen next.
I looked at my list. Wednesday afternoon’s first thing was supposed to be de-stressing and that was what I would do. I pulled my chair over to the window to sit and watch the outside. I could hear two cats fighting, but I couldn’t see them, and after about half an hour a fox walked slowly past the bins, and disappeared into the hedge.
Through the glass the sun was shining on my shoulders and face, and the afternoon was warm. You could actually start a fire just by reflecting the sun through a piece of glass so you had to be careful, but I decided that sitting here was safer and in autumn with weak sun it would probably be a better way to get rid of pastiness than going for a walk. This might help the bobbly rash on my arms too, so I wound up my sleeves. I began to unwind and thought about my grandpa leaving without any correcting lessons, and that no police had come to ask me about the couple in the park, and I started to feel a tiny bit better.
I heard something above me. Bang bang bang then shrieking, then bang bang again, right over my head. I clenched my teeth and counted, which sometimes worked. I knew exactly what the noise was, my upstairs neighbour’s children had come but they didn’t live here in the house. They lived with their father and only visited sometimes. They saw their mother less than I saw mine and I was a grown-up, and they were still children and children needed supervision. Why were they here again? No balls in the house my mother had always said. I hadn’t really liked playing with balls, but my brother had been there then, and he spent hours bouncing a ball against the living room wall or on the floor. My mother hadn’t even been able to hear it upstairs in her bedroom, and she would come in when it was time for supper to find me leaning, banging my head, fingers in my ears, jaw clenched. I didn’t like noises. I didn’t like noisy people.
I had seen my upstairs neighbour many times since I moved in, but I lived alone and I never talked to her, and didn’t look at her if I could help it, especially her face. I didn’t like looking into people’s eyes. When I had moved in she was already here. Her name was Karen. I had seen it on her letters and she was a doctor. It said Dr Karen Watson. She wasn’t young, and she didn’t care what she looked like. She wore grey and beige clothes, and she had had the same coat for the whole five years we had lived in the same house and I didn’t think she had ever cleaned it. Her hair was messy and looked greasy to me, I wouldn’t want to touch it and I had never seen her smile. Her mouth was like a straight line across her face. She carried a very old Asda bag and a brown handbag and she looked like a tired person. She doesn’t even do her coat up, and you should or you wouldn’t get the benefit, my mother told me that. Her boys had satchels and school clothes which were a bit worn out and never neat and they had an older sister, a girl who tried to say hello to me if I was on the stairs, but I didn’t reply. She was very quiet, and the taller brother was noisy and I knew it would be him banging the ball and making a noise. He reminded me of the boys in the playground when I was at school, and that was why I hated it there. I had to spend all my time trying to find a quiet spot where I wouldn’t get pushed, or made to join in with things I never asked to do and didn’t see the point of.
Calm, I liked to be calm and on my own. Thinking about myself from the outside, which Mother said I should try and do, I didn’t smile or laugh if I could help it, only sometimes when I was really nervous. Sometimes I would stand in the bathroom in front of the mirror and smile. That wasn’t a real smile, but if I was going to have a job in a place with other people I would have to smile my mother said but I didn’t like my face when it was smiling. I preferred to be content, which was a calm version of happy and I was content now I lived here but not when it was noisy like this with Karen’s children.
I turned my arms over so that the sun would get both sides, even though the rash was only on the back, but I like things to be even. I tried my cloud shape coping strategy and thought I could see a horse in the cloud just ahead of me. It wasn’t working, I still felt very tense and I clenched my teeth together. I just wished the boy would shut up, I couldn’t do anything while the ball was banging and he seemed to be shouting at his brother, who didn’t reply. I heard the front door close and footsteps coming up the stairs, so I jumped down and looked through the little spy hole in my door and saw the sister. I stayed very still even though you can’t see in through the spy hole, only out. The footsteps went upstairs and she opened the door and went in. She must have taken the ball away because the banging stopped, and she had a cross voice then a soothing voice and then I heard the television come on and that was better. It wasn’t perfect and I was finding the whole day nearly as exhausting as yesterday but at least my jaw relaxed a little. I hadn’t made any plans or done my exercises and Wednesday was nearly over. My head was too tired for plan-making and my body was so tired that I couldn’t do any exercises. Everything was going to pieces and I needed to get back on track. I went over to my desk and wrote on a Post-it, TOMORROW, PLAN-MAKING DAY, AND EXERCISES AND CLEAN FLAT. It was a lot for one day so I got another Post-it, and wrote EXERCISES AND CLEAN FLAT. It seemed more manageable and I threw the first one away and stuck the new one on to my computer monitor. Then I took a clean piece of paper and wrote:
WORK WANTED. MUST BE WITHIN TWENTY MINUTES’ TRAVELLING DISTANCE. INSTRUCTION ESSENTIAL. PLEASE CONTACT NICK IN FLAT ONE, MY NUMBER IS 07938 557801. CALL BEFORE KNOCKING.
Then I walked downstairs and pinned it on to the noticeboard that I had put below the clock, and went back upstairs to sit by the window. I had made a plan but I had overdone it and now I was feeling overwhelmed.
I tried to remember when I had last seen the children here. It was hot, I remember that, so it might have been in July and now it was September. The sister went to big school next to her brothers’ primary school and they had different uniforms but they had all looked very sweaty. I wished they hadn’t come, I really had needed peace and quiet today, and I tried to squash down the feeling that someone was deliberately trying to push me off balance. It was a big coincidence though, the park, then Grandpa coming and making me upset, then the children. These were all things that didn’t happen often in my routine. A lot of them were firsts, like Grandpa leaving, and they never all happened on the same day. Ever. Just as I was thinking about it all, my downstairs neighbour came round the corner carrying a bag, so now I had no peace below or above me. He looked really strange, not like his usual self at all. He was carrying a bag saying Oddbins in his right hand and had a
cigarette in his mouth and I had never seen him smoke before. He didn’t have work clothes on, he was in a pair of tracksuit trousers and a dirty T-shirt and I wondered if he had become an undercover policeman instead. I thought he would put the cigarette out, but he unlocked the door and as he disappeared into the house and stepped out of my line of vision I could still see the smoke that had been pouring from it hanging in the air outside. I hate smoking. I know that it is illegal in communal areas, and my downstairs neighbour is a policeman, I know that from his letters too, when I put them on to the table. Why would a policeman be breaking the law and filling up my lungs with smoke? My jaw clenched back up. Smoke would be in my flat too; it would come through his ceiling into my living areas. My flat was the same layout as his: the house was three floors, all the same, with a staircase and hallway out of each one. The house was wide and like a rectangle with the short sides at each end, and low, which would mean that the smoke would probably contaminate every room with carcinogens. I wanted to go downstairs and shout at him, but I couldn’t do one more thing today.
I knew that I couldn’t go to bed yet. I sat and looked at the sky for as long as I could but it was still only six o’clock. I really didn’t like the day I was having, and I did another one of my exercises, breathing in through my nose, and out through my mouth, clenching my hands and feet and relaxing them. I stared out of my window, trying not to think of the smoke which was invisibly filling my flat or the moving and television above me. I looked at the houses, one by one, and noticed which ones were flats, which were being done up and becoming what my grandpa called gentrified. The wide street looked quiet, and slowly my panic subsided again. I recognised faces in kitchens and at windows that I saw every day, but I didn’t speak to strangers.
It was a quiet road but it was on a bus route. I often counted buses coming along, or I counted the cats which prowled the gardens. I saw a cat waiting on the pavement judging how far away an oncoming red bus was and then suddenly making a dash across Staverton Road. He got to the other side without getting run over. The bus stopped and the doors opened, and I realised that Dr Karen from upstairs with the noisy son was getting off. Wasn’t anyone sticking to their routine today? I knew what time she came – never before eight. She looked cross, and tired, and ugly. I watched her getting closer to the house when suddenly with no warning she looked straight up at my window, and at me. Our eyes met and she actually stopped walking and stood still. I hate people staring at me. My eyes screwed up a bit and she still stared, so I rolled off the chair and on to the floor. I stayed there a long time. Nothing was making sense. The sooner today ended, the better.
3 | Karen
‘I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand.’
— Confucius
Wednesday afternoon
Karen’s office was an unimpressive grey eight-by-ten box at the front of a hospital which had been built entirely from concrete in the 1960s. The whole structure was monotone, from exterior to pavement, and it looked as though it needed hosing down from top to bottom. The windows were covered in a carbon monoxide city glaze that robbed the interior of light, and the pallor of Karen’s skin, her clothes and her filing cabinet could all have come from a colour chart for a prison. The only beacon of light in this small cell of urban misery came from a computer screen. It illuminated the rapid tapping of fingers on a keyboard.
The phone rang, and the jerk of her body in response would have been obvious even to a casual observer. Karen scraped her frizzy, grey-streaked hair back with the reading glasses she had bought for a pound on the concourse of Victoria station, and looked suspiciously at the unwanted interruption. She had never changed the ringtone, it wouldn’t have occurred to her, so the default jangle rang out strident and familiar and set to high volume. She didn’t get many calls and had never set up her address book, so there was no clue on the screen as to the identity of the interruption. She hated talking to anyone when she was in the middle of developing an important idea and thought about leaving it to ring, but something niggled at the back of her brain.
Eyes still on the monitor, she took a breath and pressed the green button.
‘Hello?’
The voice on the other end sounded young and she knew at once who it was.
‘Mum, you’re supposed to be picking us up from school today. Where are you?’
She missed the resignation in the voice of her eldest child completely because she was rereading a paragraph.
‘Mum?’
‘I’m here, Sarah, I thought we agreed that you were old enough to make your own way home now. That’s why I bought you a travel pass.’
‘I know that, but you said we’re all going for a pizza today because you missed my birthday for the autism conference and we haven’t seen you since.’
Through the lightbulb moment of academic excitement that Karen was experiencing as she reread her words on the monitor, a feeling of guilt and recognition penetrated her consciousness.
‘Of course. I’ll be there in half an hour.’
Silence. Not for the first time Karen was flooded with resentment at the constant conflict between motherhood and work, and the lack of recognition of what she actually did every day. She sighed inwardly and spoke.
‘I’m really looking forward to seeing you all.’
‘School’s finished, Mum, so we’ll just wait. Can you text us when you’re ten minutes away?’
‘Yes, see you soon, Sarah.’
Karen put the phone down on the desk. It was only a paragraph that she needed to finish and the kids were safe where they were. She just had to finish this thought and then she’d go.
When she pulled up outside her kids’ school there was no one around, just an empty playground. A few leaves were blowing across the tarmac and the doors all looked closed. Perhaps their dad had picked them up instead. She tried to push down the feeling of relief and picked up her phone to call Sarah.
‘Where are you? I’ve driven right across town to eat with you, when I was in the middle of something very important, and you’re not even ready.’
‘Mum, we stood there for ages and the boys were getting tired, we spoke an hour and a half ago and you said you’d text. We’re in the primary school library. We’re coming.’
Karen drummed her fingers on the steering wheel and tried to clear her head of the ideas of the day. Research was really a mental process, an intense one, and interrupting it was often disastrous. If they ate close to school the kids could hop on the Tube afterwards and she could go back to the office. She hoped she hadn’t suggested them coming back to her place for the night. Easily changed, though: she knew they didn’t like her flat. On the other hand they could get a takeaway pizza and go straight back there and she could get on.
They were coming across the playground now, dragging their feet, especially Jamie, the youngest, who was easily distracted and looked bedraggled. There all had black rings under their eyes and Karen made a mental note to speak to their father. It was vital to get enough sleep at this age, for optimum physical and mental development. She wound down the window and beckoned to them. ‘Come on, slowcoaches, let’s go and have some fun.’
Once they were all in the car, she turned, seatbelt still done up, to hug them, awkwardly. Sarah managed a small squeeze and a pat, and Jack a pat, but Jamie was in the corner and barely looked up. Karen took a decision. She would take them to have pizza near their father’s house. It was on the way to her flat and they could decide from there what they wanted to do.
As she drove the familiar route towards the restaurant and past what had once been their family home, Karen felt the awkwardness and lack of familiarity between her and the children. She felt what she always felt when she saw them: the unfairness that if she had been a man with a career she wouldn’t have been judged to be a bad parent just because she was committed to her career. It didn’t make her sad exactly, but she did feel compelled to keep explaining herself, and with every passing year she felt
less able to get her point across. The gulf between them just kept getting wider, and it correlated, as far as she could see, with the amount of time she had spent in the same house as them as a family. Sarah had been eight when Karen had moved out, Jack had been five and a half, and Jamie eleven months. She could still remember Sarah’s serious, sad little face, and Jack’s screaming as she drove off down the drive. Sarah had been holding Jamie, and he had sat quietly on her hip, too young to understand. All she wanted now was for the times they did have together to be successful, the type of relationship she saw divorced men having with their children, guilt-free and comfortable.
She parked the car, and they went inside, found a table and sat down. ‘Have whatever you fancy – have starters if you want, or ice creams afterwards. This is Sarah’s birthday treat, after all.’
As she said it, Karen remembered the card she had bought a few weeks ago. It was still in its bag on her desk. She excused herself from the silent table and went to ask a waitress if they could possibly put a sparkler into the pizza or dough balls, or sing ‘Happy Birthday’. The girl looked at her blankly and said they didn’t have sparklers, but they would sing if she wanted.
Dinner was not a success. Jack didn’t have much news for her, even though she asked; he just wanted to talk about Manchester United and a new striker that was going to change the Premiership. Karen knew nothing about football and tried to convince him that school was more important, but she knew she was fighting a losing battle. Her ex-husband had encouraged him to kick a ball about ever since he had started toddling, and he had caught the bug. Silence fell again, and Karen started to wish she could get out of there and back to what she did best.
The Man on the Middle Floor Page 4