by Jon McGregor
Perhaps I need time to get used to the idea of it, before people’s good intentions start hammering down upon me like rain.
Another of the leaflets had a section on physical effects.
You may find you become tired it said, you may find yourself experiencing dizziness, insomnia, a change in appetite.
There was a list of these things, half a dozen pages of alphabetical discomforts and pains.
I spent a long time thinking about them all, wondering which ones I’d get, wondering how well I would cope.
I thought about backache, nausea, indigestion, faintness and cramps and piles.
I thought about waking in the night with a screaming pain, clutching at the covers with clawed hands.
I thought about banging my fists against my head to distract myself from it.
I thought about religious people who train themselves to walk over burning coals and I wondered if I could control my body in the same way.
I didn’t think I could, and I got scared and gathered all the leaflets up, stacked them away in a kitchen drawer with the scissors and sellotape and elastic bands.
By the middle of the afternoon it had rained so much that the drains were overflowing, clogged up with leaves and newspapers.
The water built up until it was sliding across the road in great sheets, rippled by the wind and parted like a football crowd by passing cars.
I was shocked by the sheer volume of water that came pouring out of the darkness of the sky.
Watching the weight of it crashing into the ground made me feel like a very young child, unable to understand what was really happening.
Like trying to understand radio waves, or imagining computers communicating along glass cables.
I leant my face against the window as the rain piled upon it, streaming down in waves, blurring my vision, making the shops opposite waver and disappear.
There was a time when I might have found this exhilarating, even miraculous, but not that day.
That day it made me nervous and tense, unable to concentrate on anything while the noise of it clattered against the windows and the roof.
I kept opening the door to look for clear skies, and slamming it shut again.
And then around teatime, from nowhere, I smashed all the dirty plates and mugs into the washing-up bowl.
Something swept through me, swept out of and over me, something unstoppable, like water surging from a broken tap and flooding across the kitchen floor.
I don’t quite understand why I felt that way, why I reacted like that.
I wanted to be saying it’s just something that happens.
But I was there, that day, slamming the kitchen door over and over again until the handle came loose.
Smacking my hand against the worktop, kicking the cupboard doors, throwing the plates into the sink.
Going fuckfuckfuck through my clenched teeth.
I wanted someone to see me, I wanted someone to come rushing in, to take hold of me and say hey hey what are you doing, hey come on, what’s wrong.
But there was no one there, and no one came.
I stopped eventually, when I noticed my hands were bleeding.
I must have cut them with the smashed pieces of crockery, picking pieces out of the sink to throw them back in.
I stood still for a few moments, breathing heavily, watching blood drip from my hands onto the broken plates, wanting to sit down but unable to move.
I watched the blood pooling across the palms of my hands.
I looked at the broken plates and mugs.
I wondered where such a fierce rage had come from, and I was scared by the scale of it, by the lack of control I’d had for those few minutes.
I don’t remember ever feeling like that before, and it worried me to think that I might be changing in ways I could do nothing about.
I washed my hands clean, letting the blood and water pour over the broken crockery, counting about a dozen cuts, each as thin as paper.
The water began to sting, so I wrapped my hands in kitchen towel and held them up into the air, leaning back against the worktop, watching the blood soak through.
Later, when the bleeding had stopped and I’d covered my hands in a patchwork of plasters I found in the bathroom, I tried to get myself some food.
I thought it would make me feel better.
I’d been planning to go out and buy something, but I couldn’t face it so I stayed in and ate what I could find.
Peanut butter, sardines, cream crackers, marshmallows.
It gave me a belly-ache, which seemed an appropriate end to a bad day, a wasted and damaged day.
And it kept on raining, rattling endlessly into the ground, piling up in the streets, wedged into the gutters and the drains.
It made the street look squalid and greasy.
People were scurrying along the pavement, their coats tugged tightly around themselves, their heads bowed as though they had something to hide.
And I was locking the door and closing the curtains, and I did have something to hide.
Chapter 8
At number eighteen, the boy with the sore eyes is crouching on the floor among his arrangement of things, he is still thinking about the girl at number twenty-two, the girl with the short blonde hair and the little square glasses, the girl with the nicest sweetest smile he thinks.
He’s thinking about the time he met her properly, besides seeing her in the street and sometimes saying hello, the time at a party round the corner when she’d stood and talked with him for a long part of the evening, and hadn’t seemed to notice his blinking and hand scratching, perhaps because it was dark or perhaps because she didn’t make him feel nervous by acting as though he was, the way most people do. They talked a lot, and laughed, and poured each other drinks and he’d felt comfortable and good and real with her, and she’d touched his arm once or twice, and looked him in the eye without saying anything, and although they hadn’t kissed he thinks probably they could have done. It was there is what he thinks. And she’d asked him to walk her home because she felt tired and a bit uncomfortable and so he did and she held onto his arm for support, held on quite tightly because she said the pavement was moving like on a boat and she said sorry I’m not normally this drunk honestly and laughed. She laughed a lot, that night. And just before she went inside he said, very quickly, do you want to go out sometime, for a drink or something or? And she’d grinned a big squint-eyed grin and said yes yes, Wednesday night, I’ll come round Wednesday night and we’ll go somewhere and then she’d gone in and closed the door and he’d gone home and barely slept until dawn.
Next door, in the back bedroom of number sixteen, a young girl is playing by herself. She has a picture book with removable sticky figures, she is removing them and replacing them, standing them on their heads on the tops of houses, making them swim in duckponds, dropping them from a height and seeing where they land. She is waiting for her father to wake, so she can have breakfast and get dressed.
He rubs at his bloodshot eyes, the young man next door, he piles up his collection of things and squeezes them into a coffee jar, writing the date and his name on a sticker on the lid. He thinks about that Wednesday night, waiting in, trying to be relaxed, waiting for the doorbell, checking that it worked, putting music on and off. Sitting outside at midnight and realising she wasn’t coming.
He pulls the large floor-rug to one side and lifts up a loose section of floorboard. His brother, when he’d emailed him about it, had said well she was probably just so drunk she forgot, that’s all it is, go and talk to her again, she’ll still be up for it, but he’d never been so sure, maybe she’d forgotten or maybe really she’d changed her mind. Maybe she’d been too embarrassed to say anything to him about it. He remembers the next time he’d seen her, how she’d looked at him vaguely and said hello and looked away. He remembers how beautiful he sees her, the way she walks, the way she lifts her head when she laughs. How easily they’d talked together that night, the touch
of her hand on his arm. It could have been there is what he thinks.
He places the jar between the floor joists, nesting it among the dust and the cables and pipes like an egg, a bundle of memories waiting to hatch into the future. Tomorrow he will pack his bags and move to another house a few streets away, and he is reluctant to vanish without a trace. He replaces the floorboard, lays the rug over the top, returns the bed to its original position.
Today, he thinks. He could go and talk to her today. Say excuse me I hope you don’t mind me asking but do you remember that night, that party? Say excuse me but, really, I am actually very much in love with you. He smiles at the impossibility of it, blinks, scratches the back of his hand.
He puts some bread in the toaster, he walks down the stairs and out into the street. There is hardly anyone out yet, except for the art student at number eleven, and the boy on the tricycle, his head down, rattling and racing along the pavement. He looks up at the clear sky, stretching his arms, turning and briefly looking at the closed front door of number twenty-two. He hears the kerchang of the toaster and goes back inside, leaving the door open.
She opens her front door, just a little, just enough, and she hops down her front steps, the young girl from number nineteen, glad to be out of the house and away from the noise of her brothers. The television was boring and strange anyway, it was all people talking and she didn’t understand. She taps her feet on the pavement, listening to the sound her shiny black shoes make against the stone, and then she strides along the pavement with her fingers linked behind her back the way she’s seen her father walk when he’s walking with the other old men. She watches her feet as they spring between the paving slabs, enjoying the bounce and the hop of it, counting each step, stopping when she gets to twenty because that’s as far as she knows.
She looks up, balancing on one foot, and spins around and around and she can see a spiral blur of sandy-coloured houses and blue sky and streaks of red and blue and yellow from people’s curtains and all the colours spin round and when she stops suddenly it all carries on spinning for a moment and she feels dizzy. She sees a man sitting on his garden wall, a young man, and he is looking at her and smiling. She looks away quickly, and counts twenty steps back towards her house, bounce bounce, not stepping on the cracks.
The man sitting on his wall, outside number eleven, he is drawing a picture of the street. He has pens and pencils and rulers and erasers and a compass and a protractor, and he is drawing a very detailed picture of the row of houses opposite, trying to get the correct perspectives and elevations, trying to capture all of the architectural details.
That is what he wants to get onto the page, all the architectural details. For now there are just a few lines, faintly etched and erased and re-etched, between a scattering of dots and noted numbers and angles. He wants to do a good job of this today. He’s been told that his drawing is weak and that he must improve it, and he doesn’t want to lose his place on the course so he is trying very hard. He begins to measure the widths of the houses, squinting along the length of his arm, looking for the correct proportions. These houses are very different from the houses in his street, of course. The colour, the shape, the way they are all joined into one another, the height of them, it is all different from his village at home. But he likes them, there is a pride to see in these houses, in their age and in their grandeur. He knows that they were built over a hundred years ago, and that they were built for the owners of the textile factories, houses big enough to have servants squeezed into the attics and cellars, houses rich enough to have stained glass over the doors and sculpted figure heads amongst the eaves. He wonders about the people who lived in these houses first, the rich gentlemen and their elegant wives, their cooks and butlers and footmen, what they would say if they could see their houses now, shunted into the poor part of town, broken up into apartments and bedsits, their gardens mostly unkept, their paintwork mostly crumbling.
But still he thinks, even if they are not what they were they are still good houses, in a good street with wide pavements and plenty of trees for shade and life. He measures the distances between the ridges and the eaves, calculating the angles, and as he looks towards the far end of the street he notices that the hop-skipping girl is standing right behind him and is looking at his skeletal drawing.
He looks at her. She looks at the paper, at him, and back at the paper.
It is the street he says, and he waves a hand at the row of houses opposite, I am drawing your marvellous street, and she giggles because his accent makes marvellous rhyme with jealous. Where are the windows she says, in a very still and quiet voice, and she rubs her finger on the page.
Not yet he says, smiling at her, first I draw the walls and roofs and then I will draw the windows and doors and all the things. She looks at him, and at the page, and across the street. Where is the dog she says in the same voice, and she moves her finger across the page to where she thinks the dog should be.
Okay he says, I will put the dog in for you. But only after the windows he says, and he smiles at her. She looks at him, she turns around and skips across the road.
He watches her for a moment, he takes a pencil and sketches in the lines of the rooftop, the ground, the eaves, carefully, hesitantly, joining the marks of the measurements he has made. He looks from the page to the building, he sighs and he pulls at the loose skin around the corners of his forehead, it is very difficult he is thinking.
Upstairs at number twenty, the old man stands by the window, waiting for the kettle to boil, watching the twin brothers creeping into the garden of number seventeen, raised up on the fronts of their feet like a couple of Inspector Clouseaus.
The old man pushes his fingers into the thick white strands of his hair, he watches.
The boys are carrying elaborate waterguns, bright coloured plastic, blue cylinders and pink pressure pumps, green barrels and triggers, and they move to stand either side of the open front-room window, pressing flat against the wall like miniature sentries in a Swiss clocktower.
The kettle behind him sighs its way to a boil, and he watches the boys plunge their heads and arms into the billow of the drifting net curtain, their thin high voices echoing up to his window.
They re-emerge, they turn and they run from the garden, waving their guns like cowboys and indians, their faces hysterical with laughter and excitement and fear. A young man with wet hair appears at the window, shouting, wiping his face with the palm of his hand.
The old man laughs quietly. He likes the twins, they’re funny, they remind him of his great-nephew, the same energy, the same cheek. He laughs again, and the breath whistles in the top of his lungs, the pain is suddenly there again, like cotton thread being yanked through his airways, the whistling getting louder, the hot red streaks beginning to splinter across his vision and he leans against the worktop, gulping for oxygen, jaw flapping, a fish drowning in air.
The kettle shrieks to a boil. The lid rattles with the pressure of the steam.
Downstairs, the man with the carefully trimmed moustache is getting dressed. He is standing in front of a mirror, fastening the top button of a crisp white shirt. He combs his thin black hair, straight down at the back, straight down at the sides, either side of a straight central parting on the top. He puts the comb back in its plastic wallet and takes a bowtie from the open leather suitcase on his table, where he keeps all his clothes. He loops it around his collar, lifting his head to tie the knot, adjusting it, tweaking at the corners until he gets it straight.
Upstairs, the old man clutches at his throat, head tipped back, mouth gaping, silent, staring at the ceiling like a tourist in the Sistine Chapel.
Chapter 9
It took me a long time to get to sleep that night.
The rain was still spattering against the window, and there was a loud fall of water from a broken gutter onto the concrete below.
I blocked my ears with the bedcovers, I breathed slowly and deeply, I counted to a hundred, I counted to five hu
ndred.
I gave up eventually, and put the light on, and sat up in bed to read.
But I couldn’t concentrate, I kept thinking about that day, that moment, the afternoon.
About what happened and why there are so many names I can’t remember.
About whether I knew the names in the first place.
Whenever I tried to read my book the images kept returning, small moments from that day and I don’t understand why I can’t leave it alone.
It’s a strange feeling, almost like a guilty feeling, almost like I feel responsible.
I thought about going back up to my room that morning, after a shower and a mouthful of breakfast.
Swinging the window open, and the flood of fresh summer air that had come sweeping in, the sweetness of a rolling wind that was still clean from the countryside.
Seeing the guy from over the road poking his head through an attic skylight and tipping a bucket of water over some kids in their front garden.
I tried to remember his name, and all I could remember was the ring through his eyebrow, the way he used to smack the palm of one hand with the back of the other.
I remembered how hard it was to pack, how I spent the morning rearranging boxes and bags and rewriting lists.
I hadn’t known what I was going to need, what I should throw away or leave behind, what I should give to someone for safekeeping.
I still hadn’t known where I was going.
I remembered phoning the landlord and asking for another week, and panicking when he said people were due to move in the next evening.
I remembered looking at my overflowing room, and the empty boxes, and not knowing where to begin.
I thought about how I’d gone and stood in Simon’s room for a while, looking at the sunlight brightening and fading on the ceiling.
Thinking about him leaving the week before, and how bare his room was now.
The unfaded squares on the wall where his posters had been.