by Jon McGregor
The naked mattress on the floor, a curve in the middle where the springs had begun to fail.
And the things he’d left behind, unable to fit them into the boxes he’d squeezed into his dad’s car.
Coathangers in the wardrobe that rattled like skeletons when I stood on the loose floorboards.
A muted noticeboard on the desk, pimpled with drawing pins.
A paper lightshade he’d taken down but left behind, folded on the floor like a deflated accordion.
The room had a hardness in it without his things there, an emptiness that made me want to close the door, leave a do not disturb sign outside, let the dust settle.
I remembered going to the shops to buy binbags, and saying hello to the boy at number eighteen.
He was on his doorstep, reading, and I caught his eye and he smiled so I said hello.
I think it was the only time I ever spoke to him.
He said how are you doing, how’s the packing going, he said it with a little laugh, as though it was a joke.
Oh I said, fine I said, and I wondered how he knew that’s what I was doing.
There was a silence, and we looked at each other, and I noticed he was blinking a lot and I thought he looked nervous.
He said, last day of summer, everyone’s packing aren’t they, and he did the little laugh again, and I said well you know, all good things come to an end and he said yes.
I said well I’d better get to the shop, I’ll see you around, yes he said, yes, okay, well, see you then.
And he held up his hand, a wave like half a surrender, and by the time I walked back he had gone.
I remembered going back to my room and trying to imagine it being like Simon’s.
I took a poster off the wall to see how much the sunlight had faded the paint in the time I’d been there.
I took all my clothes out of the wardrobe and made the coathangers rattle.
I couldn’t picture the room being as changed and empty as Simon’s already was.
I wanted to leave a note for the next tenant, leave a trace of myself behind, I wanted to be able to go back years later and find a plaque with my name on it screwed to the wall.
I thought about all this, lying in bed listening to the rain, looking at the room I sleep in now, another room in another city.
I looked at the objects that make it my room, the calendar on the wall, the colour of the curtains, the photographs.
I thought about all the other people who’ve slept in this room before me, about what traces they’ve left behind.
It took me a long time to get to sleep.
And when I woke up in the morning the room felt different, haunted, and I had to get out of bed quickly.
It had stopped raining, finally, but the street outside was still wet, swathes of dirty water across the road, sodden pages of newsprint glued to the pavement like transfers.
Perhaps the words will soak into the stone I thought, yesterday’s stories imprinted like cave paintings, like a tattoo.
I left early for work, I didn’t want to stay in my flat after the previous day.
I couldn’t face cleaning up the broken plates or reading those leaflets again.
I got dressed and slipped out of the door without any breakfast, down the steps and past the back door of the shop downstairs.
There was a cold wind, but it was a dry wind and it felt good on my skin and I sucked big mouthfuls of it into my lungs.
There was a girl with a striped overall standing by the back door of the shop, smoking, I’ve seen her there before.
She smiled and said hello and I was surprised so I think I only nodded.
I walked along the main road, the wind blowing across my face, the traffic steaming slowly past me in fits and starts and stops.
I felt better than the day before, much better, I could feel the blood in my cheeks and the light in my eyes.
I felt like a spring was uncoiling inside me.
I could feel the creak and sing of my muscles loosening, like a child bouncing on an old leather sofa, and the faster I walked the better I felt.
I began striding, my arms swinging, my bag banging against my back, my shoes click-clacking on the pavement like a runaway metronome.
It had been weeks since I felt like that, since I felt such a simple exuberance at being alive and outside, and I felt cleansed by it, by the noise and the light and the wind all rushing in upon me.
I wanted to sing.
I wanted to run.
But I managed to contain myself, and keep a blank face, and anyone seeing me would only have thought I was late for work.
I walked myself out of breath in the end.
I stopped at a cornershop by the ring road and went in to buy something for breakfast.
The man said good morning and I smiled and nodded.
I bought a bread roll and some fruit, and I sat on an upturned milk crate outside to eat them.
The man came outside and began arranging his boxes of vegetables, straightening the price labels, wiping off the dirt.
It’s better day is it? he said to me, yes I said, much better.
Yes he said, and he stood back and looked up at the sky like a soothsayer, too much rain, is bad for the heart, you know, do you know what I mean?
I smiled and said yes and stood up, holding my banana skin, not knowing what to do with it.
He looked at it and said ah, bin is over there, pointing to the other side of the road.
And at work I spent the whole day trying to decide how I could tell someone, who I could tell.
I even wrote lists, names, opening lines, all by the way and actually there is something and can I tell you.
I wondered if a conversation could turn that way, if I’d get the chance to say oh well it’s funny you should mention that because.
I wondered if I’d take the chance, even if it were to be offered.
I still had the plasters on my hands, I had to keep them hidden, I kept my fists closed, hid my hands under the desk to peel them off.
They left sticky trails around the edges, like chalk outlines on crime scene pavements, and when I rubbed at them they curled into dark strings and twisted across my skin.
I looked at the wounds for a long time, turning my hands under the desklight, a dozen pink unstitchings already beginning to fade and heal.
The marks are still there now, and I’m worried they might scar, I’m worried what people might think.
If they saw, if they looked at my hands and they noticed.
Chapter 10
He knows. He sits in his kitchen, breathing clearly again, the old man upstairs at number twenty, he listens to the sound of his blood crashing through his ears. He sits, and he looks at the cooling kettle, and he knows. The doctor told him, told him as much as she could, over the course of a few appointments, in between various tests.
I don’t like the sound of those lungs of yours she said, first.
They sound rather unhappy to me she’d said, with the ice-cold searchlight of a stethoscope pressed against his chest, with a concentrated look in her eyes like she was trying to imagine herself inside him.
I’d like to find out some more about that she’d said, do a few tests, make sure it’s nothing untoward. That was what she’d said, untoward, and he remembers thinking it was a strangely old-fashioned word for a young woman like her to be using.
He remembers noticing that she kept the stethoscope in a long black case with polished brass fastenings and an engraved plaque. It had looked like a present from somebody, and he’d thought it was a strange thing to give as a gift, and he’d wondered how long she’d had it, how many unhappy sounds she’d heard through its earpieces.
That was where it started, with unhappy-sounding lungs. I’d like to find out some more about that she’d said. He hadn’t liked the way she’d talked to him, not at first, it had seemed patronising, distant. But now, now that things are how they are, he is glad of her manner. It helps him to hear all that she sa
ys, the details, the projections. And he knows.
But his wife, she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know a thing.
That first time, when he’d returned from the clinic with a thumb-sized plaster over the puncture in his arm, he’d said everything was fine there was nothing to worry about, he was fit as a fiddle. And he’d gone on to prove it, in a way which surprised them both and made her feel much younger than she was. He’d only lied to stop her worrying, he’d only lied because he didn’t think there was anything to worry about. He’d thought the doctor would call him back in, tell him some things about the blood test that he didn’t understand, and then say he should exercise a little more. Cut down on fried foods. Drink less. And his wife does take to worrying easily and he didn’t want her fretting over something so insignificant.
Next door, the young man with the bloodshot eyes begins his packing by taking down his work from the walls. He is ready to leave this house now, he has left his mark here and he is ready to pack his things and leave, so he takes down the papers and photographs and objects that are blutacked and pinned to the walls.
Most of the papers are to do with his work, notes and plans and quotations to help him structure his dissertation, sketches of burning Viking longboats, of prehistoric burial mounds, of Indian funeral pyres, photographs of mahogany coffins with brass handles, of crematorium chimneys. He takes all these pictures down, rubbing away the blu-tac left on the wallpaper, and he puts them into a large red folder with funeral rites from pre-history to post-history written on it in thick black pen. He takes down photocopied sheets of poetry, of religious text, of lecture notes from his archaeology course.
And from a small shelf in the middle of all these papers he takes down an unglazed clay figure, a replica of a Japanese ceremonial idol, and he wraps it in thin tissue and an old newspaper. He puts it in a box and turns away, he looks out of the window and sees the boy with the tricycle following the twins into number seventeen’s front garden, he looks up and sees someone leaning out of the attic window with a bucket of water.
In his kitchen, the old man refills the kettle with fresh water, and sets it to boil again. He thinks about his wife, and he thinks about what she doesn’t know. He hears shrieking from outside, laughter, children running.
He hadn’t even told her about the second visit to the doctor’s, or the third or the fourth. He’d invented stories, walks around town, bowls matches, shopping trips, surprise meetings with old friends. And once he’d started it had seemed so difficult to stop. There was a time when he could have spoken, after another test they’d done which had taken all day, a complicated thing where they’d smeared him with gel and scanned him like luggage in an airport, and he’d felt that perhaps the time had come when he should say something, make hints, leave clues.
A bloodied handkerchief in the washbasket, an appointment card on the noticeboard.
But he didn’t want to have to admit to having lied to her at all, and he couldn’t bear to think of her worrying and upsetting over him, especially not now that it seems there is nothing really to be done about it. So he knows, and she doesn’t know, and this makes it easier, and this makes it harder.
He knows about the look the doctor had on her face when she’d spoken to him about that first testing of blood, the look she’d tried to hide behind a shuffle of papers and a smile. Well now she’d said, things aren’t exactly one hundred percent the way we’d like them to be, we’d like to do a little more investigating. I can’t pretend there’s nothing to worry about she’d said, but the sooner we know what’s wrong the sooner we can do something about it, yes? Which had seemed a sensible enough thing to say at the time, except that with each further test they did the likelihood of there being something they could do about it seemed to decrease. And unlike the doctor, he can very much pretend there is nothing to worry about, to his wife at least. All he can do now, it seems, is to protect her from the truth. This is what he thinks.
The kettle begins a low whistle which will soon become a shriek, and as he stands to move towards it he notices that the twins have disappeared. He moves the kettle off the heat and rolls a splash of water around in the pot.
She doesn’t know, as he knows, that after that scan with the gel they’d had him in for what they’d called a lumbar puncture, he hasn’t told her that the needle in his spine felt like a fist sunk into his bone, much as he’s often imagined a bullet might feel. He wore a vest to bed for a month to hide the bruising, bruising which spread across his back like purple flowers opening out their petals, and he could only say he was feeling the cold when she asked him about it. Say he was getting older. Make a joke about it.
In the attic bedroom of number seventeen, the room usually occupied by the tall girl with the glitter round her eyes, the boy with the pierced eyebrow puts down an empty bucket and laughs silently, crouched over, exclaiming a trio of yeses and slapping the palm of one skinny hand with the back of the other. He can hear the children in the street, he thinks maybe he can hear one of them crying a little, he runs his fingers through his short damp hair and laughs again. He looks at the time, it’s early but he’s wide awake now, he looks around the room and thinks a moment. He looks at the girl’s bed, neatly made, unslept in, he looks at her makeup crammed across the mantelpiece, the framed photos on the wall, the textbooks stuffed under the bed. He puts the bucket back where it came from, carefully lined up under the leaky stain on the ceiling, and he leaves the room, running down the two flights of stairs, into the kitchen, and out the back door, crashing it shut behind him, striding out through the backyard and down the alley, a man on a mission, a smile still wrapped around his face and water still dribbling down the back of his neck.
In his room, upstairs at number eighteen, the young man blinks painfully, turning away from the window and holding the palms of his hands over his eyes for a moment. He takes the clay figure out of the box again, unwraps it, looks at it, runs his fingers over its smooth lines and rough texture.
The small figure is the reason he started working on the dissertation subject he did, the reason he argued with his tutors about the boundaries between archaeology and anthropology, and it’s the reason he wants to travel to Japan as soon as he has finished his course, to see the real things, to see what he has imagined so many times.
The figure comes from a place somewhere south of Tokyo, a place where mothers go when they have lost young children. Very young, as in not even or only just born; the miscarried, the stillborn, the aborted. The mothers go to this place, a Buddhist temple on a wooded hillside, and they take tiny pieces of clothing for their ghost children, and gifts, and prayers. He has seen photographs of the temple grounds, and he has spoken to a lecturer who has been there, the lecturer who gave him this replica figure, and it’s a place and a rite that has stuck in his mind. He imagines them, the mothers, walking up the steps, between soaring bamboo stems and carefully ordered miniature waterfalls, beside pools with carp drifting slowly among the lilies. He imagines them walking slowly, leaving gentle impressions in the gravelled pathways, moving to the place set aside for them, pressing their flat hands together and holding them against their faces, their limbs a triangle pointing skywards, the small space between their fingers filled with a hot breathlessness.
He opens the red folder again and pulls out a postcard of the place, holds it behind the figure, looks at it for the hundredth time. He looks at the figures in the picture, row after row after row, dozens, hundreds of them, identical little six-inch Buddhas, the smooth domes of their heads like pebbles on a beach, numerous, indistinguishable. Some of the figures, towards the back of the picture, look a little weathered, but mostly they are new and clean. None of them were more than a year old when the picture was taken, and when he goes to see for himself there will be a new set of figures not more than a year old.
He turns over the postcard, to remind himself of what he always thinks when he looks at this picture, he reads the words he wrote when he first saw it, the words in thick
black ink, they are all named it says, each one of them has a name.
He turns it back again, looks closer. Some of the figures are dressed up, in traditional woollen caps and shawls, or in baseball jerseys, or with tiny coloured parasols to protect them from the sun. There is one with an unused Bugs Bunny bib strung enormously around its neck. At their feet are offerings, comforts. Packets of sweets. Money. A yo-yo.
He puts the postcard back in the folder, he takes down a photograph of Graceland, he takes down scraps of paper with marker-pen diagrams and spidercharts, he tries to rub more blu-tac from the wall.
In his kitchen, the old man measures out the tea-leaves, drops them into the pot, fills it with boiling water. He sets out a tray, two cups, two saucers, a small jug of milk, a small pot of sugar, two teaspoons. He breathes heavily as his hands struggle up to the high cupboards, fluttering like the wings of a caged bird.
His wife doesn’t know, as he has known for weeks now, that any treatment they will be able to offer him will be, as the doctor had said, with a steady gaze and a hand to his arm, only in the form of palliative care. You do understand what that means don’t you she’d said, not even blinking, you do understand? And he’d looked straight back at her, holding her professional eye contact, and said yes, thankyou doctor, I do understand, yes. And he’d coughed, hard, repeatedly, spraying blooded phlegm into his handkerchief as if to prove how much he understood.
Yes, thankyou doctor, I understand.
Things are not exactly one hundred percent the way we would like them to be.
He slips a tea-cosy over the pot and stands by the window a moment.
He sees a young man sitting on the front garden wall of number seven, one of the foreign students it looks like, holding a pad of large paper, staring at the houses opposite.
He sees a dog trotting along the middle of the road, a bald patch across one shoulder, an unevenness in its stride.
He sees a construction crane rising up above the houses away to the right, a few streets away, stretching its neck over the rooftops like an anglepoise lamp.