This Taste for Silence

by O'Callaghan, Amanda;

  ‘I don’t know what he was doing by the pond, Susannah. Maybe he was hungry or something.’ Thomas looked down at the sharp cheekbones. He looks thin, true enough.

  Susannah was waking up the whole building with her carping.

  ‘I know there’s nothing but reeds in that pond,’ Thomas called back. As if he could forget. He would never forget.

  ‘Yes, Susannah,’ Thomas agreed, trying to keep the tremble out of his voice, ‘they’re shocking, those reeds, the way they pull you down. They very nearly took this one.’

  He’s not English, by the looks of him, Thomas thought. Not a sailor with those boots. ‘I didn’t put myself in any danger, Susannah,’ he called down the passageway. ‘I just pulled the man out with my good arm. And, no, I wasn’t afraid in the least.’

  Thomas lifted him as best he could, pulled him inside along the narrow hall, curled him onto a patch of bare floor. He stripped away the drenched clothes. He saw the bony ribs, a rise and fall of the chest so minute that he wondered whether he’d imagined it. He pressed the blankets close around the man’s still frame. No money in his pockets, just an old sketchbook, ruined now. And a tiny paintbrush.

  ‘Heavens, Susannah, I don’t know where he’s from. Does it matter when the man’s half-dead?’ Odd little carvings on the handle of the brush. ‘I need some dry clothes for him. Bring me my new shirt. I said bring it, Susannah.’

  Thomas smoothed the dark hair back from the man’s face. A high forehead. A strong jaw. He hails from somewhere well east of here, that’s for sure. Thomas felt grateful for the good fire, still burning so late. The brightness calmed him.

  ‘Let’s get him in nearer the heat, Susannah. Help me pull him over. Come, woman, while there’s still a chance.’

  Eddie stripped everything. Burned the blue counterpane. Pulled apart the bed that his mother had sobbed and died in. Where there were carpets, he tore them away, the tacks at the edges gripping the last of the weave like indignant gremlins. In the hall, the threadbare carpet proved thinner than an underlay of compacted dust that rose up like a ghoul and billowed down the steps and into the street. He hired a contraption – a kind of blowtorch – and made the paint on the walls and ceilings pucker and blister before slicing it away with a scouring blade. When everything was purged, he set up home amidst the shaved surfaces, the last, defeated shreds of colour herded into the highest corners and ignored.

  In the main room, Eddie hung his painting. A single square of colour on a stretch of bare wall. And he watched over it like a parent: proud, entranced, anxious.

  Eddie had his mother’s old tin box, garish in deep reds and golds, balanced in his lap. The ancient tiled gate, its shape bulging from the lid’s flat surface, felt pleasing under his fingertips. Turkish delight. The impossible sweetness of it. The strange happy taste still in his mouth after so long.

  There were mostly photos inside the box now, a few papers and clippings. Walter’s smug face on the curling newsprint, an advertisement for ladies’ dancing classes that pulled his throat tight with sadness, and a childish picture of a red car that made him want to weep out loud. Love from Rory was scrawled on the back in generous loops.

  Strange, Eddie thought, how the golden child always lets the side down by dying young. That was Rory. Mother’s pet, no doubt about it, but so bright and funny and good that you couldn’t hate him if you tried. He even had the blond hair. And the good teeth. They always have good teeth, Eddie thought. Seeing Rory lying on the slab, one powder-rimmed hole in his chest, Eddie felt sure that he still didn’t have a single hole in any of his teeth.

  Rory had gone into the ground as perfect as he’d always been, Eddie thought. Except for the place where cousin Mikey had shot him with the hunting gun that his father had insisted he was old enough to have. In the excitement of being eligible to kill things, Mikey forgot about not pointing, about unloading, and all the other stuff that had whistled through his empty head.

  He wiped out my brother with one clean shot, Eddie thought. Rory had gone down without a murmur, like the good boy he was. Just a small look of surprise on his beautiful face.

  Then Mother was left with me, Eddie thought. The other son. I got the Reynolds nose but my father’s irksome habits. And even worse, she was left with Dad. That hollow laugh of his. The heavy footsteps on the stairs, hours late. The empty pockets. After Rory, there was nothing. Just a furious, staring blankness, one to another.

  ‘You’re home,’ his mother used to say as his father breasted the door.

  ‘That’s what it looks like,’ he’d reply, throwing down his key on the table.

  The clink of forks on plates. Little else.

  Eddie wondered what things had been like at their best. And when that had been. There was no marriage certificate in the tin box. His mother had never given up her maiden name. He and Rory were Reynolds, just like her. She didn’t care what people said. She was always edging away from him, Eddie thought. We were her future, Rory and me. Especially Rory.

  But sometime after Rory died, his mother had stopped edging in any direction. Eddie couldn’t put a time on it. All he knew was that when he was still half a boy, she had taken to her bed, rolled towards the wall, and mused for decades on golden chances lost.

  Eddie wasn’t lonely. He was done with people, as he’d lately told the guy at the bakery. With his family gone – beautiful Rory, his aching mother, the old man with his laughs and his rages – he’d got used to his life of seclusion. He was close enough to happy.

  He didn’t need much money. Just enough to get by. He put up a notice at the bakery, left a few more fluttering on lampposts and walls. To his surprise, there was a good response. He began to make reasonable cash, gardening for executives who lived nearby, too busy or disinclined to even water their pot plants. He liked the work. It was solitary and involved keeping things alive. Both suited him now.

  There were some bad days. They still came, even without the drink. Eddie had not expected that. On these days, only vaguely aware of the traffic and the endless clang of the gate down to the basement, he would sit on the tapestry sofa that he’d dragged into the main room, staring at his painting. He would wonder about the times when it had hung on other walls, in other places. He pictured it shrouded in the backs of wardrobes, or interred in travelling chests, the great ocean juddering outside.

  He called it The London Painting. There was no other name. No signature, no frame-maker’s mark. He knew every inch of it. My inheritance, he thought. In his solitary life, that street scene was his crowd. It was all the people he needed.

  Among them one day, he saw a boy.

  There were about ten people in the picture, mostly ranged along a busy street. Wooden buildings pressed impossibly close on either side; slick laneways branched from the main thoroughfare and cornered into darkness. There were animals and carts, two men chatting, one wiping his brow. There was a face at one of the overhead windows, a laughing woman on the step, a travelling locksmith hanging bunches of keys as big as cabbage heads.

  There were children, too. He’d thought he knew them all. The one leaning towards the fruit vendor, the two grubby ones kicking a ball under a cart. In the bottom corner, a round-shouldered boy was dragging his reluctant horse into the frame and onwards.

  And now, another boy.

  A boy Eddie had certainly not seen in the painting when he showed it to Frank, or to Walter. A boy leaning around the corner from the laneway, his blond hair curling out from under an enormous cap, a quizzical look on his face. The jacket he was wearing was too big for him, and it hung open at the neck. Beneath the dark wool, a patch of red bloomed like a poppy on his chest.

  The face was unmistakable. It was Rory.

  Eddie sprang to his feet. Damp, he thought. The plumbing in this old building complained half the day and most of the night. The ceilings still bore faint blooms of past disasters, tattooed into the fleshy pl
aster. It’s damage from a leaking pipe, he thought. That was it. Eyes playing tricks.

  Eddie ran his finger lightly across the figure of the boy. Bone dry. He looked around, half expecting some hideous prank. The apartment was as still as a museum.

  He got out the tin box of photos and keepsakes, scrabbling among the papers until he found what he was looking for. It pained him to look at it. A photo of Rory taken at Mikey’s party, just days before the end. Mikey and Rory, first cousins, arms draped around each other. Rory with his square white teeth, Mikey grinning into the camera with his bland and stupid face.

  After Rory died, Eddie’s mother had pulled out all the other photos of Mikey and her brother’s family and shredded them into confetti with her pointed fingers. She had thrown the tiny scraps out the back window and watched them flit towards the East River on a stiff breeze. She had spared this one, the last of her magnificent dead boy. There he stood, entwined, inseparable, looped around his killer.

  As Eddie held the photo up to the painting he was already telling himself that this solitary life was not doing him much good. Those imagined fancies of yours. That’s what his mother used to call his childhood nightmares, her words meeting him in the hall, turning him back to his terrifying bed.

  But, side by side, photo and painting, a stranger could have seen it in a moment. It was him.

  Eddie went out immediately, leaving his jacket on its peg. He walked until well past nightfall, deaf to the rattle of the city, thinking of Rory, feeling truly afraid for the first time since those nightmares, since the flash of Mikey’s gun with its towering noise reverberating around the barn, and Rory falling back and lying intolerably still. And the footsteps from the big house, and the shouts as they came, and the ending of things.

  By the time Eddie got back to his apartment, it was almost light. He was cold but at least the night was dry. He’d accidentally left his front door open to the hall. The painting will be gone, he told himself, his feet on the stairs. That face will be gone.

  No one had come in. No one had scooped up his few possessions. But when he walked into the main room he could see at a glance that no one had left. The tiny figure was still there. Rory, looking straight at him.

  Eddie lasted just over a fortnight before heading back to Frank. Each morning he would check the painting, his heart gonging loud in his chest like the old clock in the study, long ago. And every time, rounding the corner, there was Rory, the quizzical look, the blaze of red on his chest. Was the red spreading? Surely it looked bigger?

  By the time Eddie found himself rustling in the desk drawer for a ruler, fully intending to take the measurements of a blaze of red on a dead brother in a centuries-old painting, he knew he couldn’t do this alone. Rory would have gone into the pawnshop with their dad on at least one occasion. Frank would know.

  Frank looked hard at him, and didn’t speak. They both listened to Frank’s breathing, its occasional wet crackle. The clamour of the morning rush outside was dulled by the shop’s thick glass. The place felt oddly safe.

  Frank drummed his fingers on the counter, pointed to the figure halfway up the painting. ‘You’re asking me whether this looks like your brother? Your dead brother?’

  Eddie told him again. The kid on the corner. The blond kid. He wasn’t there before. It was Rory.

  Again, the long, silent look. Frank leaned back on his stool. ‘Jesus,’ he said, at last, turning the corner of the painting away from his chest as if it were a pointed gun. ‘You’re getting more like your mother every day, Eddie. It’s not normal what you’re asking me.’

  Eddie’s temper flared without warning. Sleep had been scarce. ‘I know it’s not fucking normal,’ he hissed through his teeth.

  Frank raised an eye from the painting. A man outside the front window was cupping his face, peering in. Frank nodded towards the closed sign with a tiny derisive movement that sent the onlooker stepping back in surprise, off up the street at a pace.

  Eddie was finding it hard to keep the whole mess in perspective. ‘Just tell me,’ he said. ‘Did you ever meet Rory?’

  ‘Yeah. He came in a good few times with your dad,’ Frank said. ‘Nice kid, he was. Quiet. Kept his hands to himself and didn’t have to be told twice. Not a cheeky little brat like you.’

  Eddie was not in the mood for Frank’s banter. ‘Does this kid look like him or not?’ he said, feeling as if he could reach across the counter and pummel Frank’s jowly pink face. He softened his tone. ‘Just tell me what you think.’

  Frank peered into the painting. ‘From what I remember, yeah, it could be him alright. But, listen, Eddie …’

  Eddie slid the photograph from his pocket, held it up. ‘Look, this is Rory.’ He jabbed his finger at the smiling boy. ‘My mother took this photo two days before he died. This is what he looked like at the end. Fifteen years old. Does this look like the kid in the painting or not?’

  Frank looked at the photograph, then down to the painting. He had a good eye. He barely hesitated.

  ‘It’s him,’ he said.

  The ringing had been going on for a while. Eddie was dozing on the couch. He’d forgotten about the old phone in the spare room. His father had always insisted on calling that room the study, but there was never any study done there, not that he recalled. He remembered being thrown against the desk on more than one occasion. A kind of education.

  Buried under a tipping pile of books and curling magazines, Eddie found the handset.

  ‘How did you get this number?’ Eddie said.

  ‘And hello to you, Eddie,’ Frank said. ‘Same number it’s always been. I used to ring your dad about … stuff. Never mind. I was just ringing to see if you’re okay, that’s all. I didn’t have any other contact number.’

  Eddie said he was fine. It sounded too sharp when he was genuinely touched. There was a long pause. Down the line, he heard the bell ring in Frank’s shop. ‘I’m fine, Frank, really,’ Eddie assured him. ‘Listen, sorry about the whole painting thing.’

  ‘Forget it,’ Frank said. ‘I’ll get you again.’

  Eddie smiled. ‘I’m sure you’ll do that.’

  ‘You know me, Eddie. Hang on, I’ve got to get rid of this asshole.’

  Eddie heard the bell on Frank’s door sound again. He wondered how Frank made a living at all. Remembered Uncle Ivan’s medal.

  ‘Sorry,’ Frank said. ‘Now, Eddie, there’s another reason why I’m ringing you. It’s about the painting. I remembered something.’

  ‘Go on,’ Eddie said. The cord of the old phone reached into the hall. Rory was looking back at him through the doorway.

  ‘Well,’ Frank said, ‘you know I liked your dad. You could have a good laugh with him. Yeah, I know he was a bit hard on you kids. Same thing as me, I guess: too much booze.’

  He wasn’t hard on both kids, Eddie thought, just me. But – the memory surprised him – Rory used to shrink back from their father sometimes, when he walked too close. ‘Go on, Frank.’

  ‘Came to me the other night,’ Frank said. ‘The missus was going on about us being married forty years. As if I’d want to celebrate the worst goddamn mistake of my whole life.’ He laughed at himself with a wheezy chortle. Eddie guessed he hadn’t tried this on his rather fearsome wife. ‘Anyway, my mind was wandering, and I suddenly remembered, clear as day – your dad told me about a weird painting that your mother had. It’s got to be the same one.’

  Eddie waited while Frank coughed down the line. ‘It is,’ Eddie said.

  ‘Right,’ Frank said. ‘Well, you might know this already but I’ll say it anyway, since I’ve rung up. Your dad told me it was handed down through your mum’s family, but here’s the thing: she hated it. She was so shit scared of it she kept it wrapped up in a box or something. She wanted to get rid of it but she couldn’t for some reason.’

  ‘What was she scared of?’ Eddie said.

&nb
sp; ‘Dunno. Look, Eddie, I wasn’t taking a whole heap of notice of what your dad was on about, to be honest. I was starting to think he was getting a touch of your mother’s way about him.’

  Eddie felt a stab of loyalty. ‘What do you mean “my mother’s way”?’

  ‘No offence, Eddie. But you know she was a bit … what my grandma used to call fey. You know, F. E. Y.’ Frank was proud of his Scrabble skills. ‘It means kind of connected with the supernatural.’

  Eddie was watching the painting. ‘I know what it means, Frank. Why did Dad tell you about the picture?’

  Frank snorted. ‘Wanted me to buy it, of course. What the hell else would he be doing other than trying to make a buck?’

  ‘When was this?’ Eddie said. He could hear Frank tapping his pencil on the shop counter.

  ‘Oh, ages ago. I don’t know. Years.’ The tapping was like a drumbeat. A heartbeat. ‘Oh, hang on,’ Frank said, ‘I do know. It was just before your brother was killed. I thought your dad was avoiding me but then I found out about Rory.’

  Eddie was looking at the faces staring out of the frame.

  ‘But, Eddie,’ Frank went on. ‘Here’s the important bit. Bet you don’t know this. You know the medal? You know, the war medal, the one I sold for you?’

  ‘I remember,’ Eddie said.

  ‘Ivan. Name stuck in my head,’ Frank said. ‘Crazy Russian name for a kid in the British Army. Anyway, he was your mother’s uncle, not yours. S’pose you know that. You couldn’t have met him. Got killed in the First World War. Posthumous medal, of course. Barely more than a teenager, like half those poor bastards. Anyway, Eddie, here’s the weird bit. Your mother reckoned she could see him in the painting. That’s what your dad told me. That’s what scared her. She reckoned he just appeared.’

  The hairs on Eddie’s neck prickled, like a creature catching the scent of an unseen predator. ‘I’ll call you back, Frank,’ Eddie said. He put the receiver down on the floor.