Inventory

by Darran Anderson

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  A Note About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  To Caspian

  Describe your street. Describe another street. Compare. Make an inventory of your pockets, of your bag. Ask yourself about the provenance, the use, what will become of each of the objects you take out.

  —GEORGES PEREC, L’infra-ordinaire

  “No, don’t! Don’t dig up the past! Dwell on the past and you’ll lose an eye.”

  But the proverb goes on to say: “Forget the past and you’ll lose both eyes.”

  —ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN, The Gulag Archipelago

  Prologue

  It took months before the full symptoms made themselves known. In the distant frozen north, having abandoned his ship in the ice, Sir John Ross discovered that a scar, from a bayonet thrust through his body in a sea battle off the coast of Bilbao thirty years before, was transforming back into an open wound. Eighty years later, in the distant frozen south, Captain Lawrence “Titus” Oates, thirty-one and already dying, found that a long-healed gunshot wound to the leg, which he’d received a decade earlier in the Boer War, had never truly gone away.

  Two million sailors died slowly and terribly of scurvy during the Age of Discovery, without knowing that vitamin C is needed to bind tissue, including scars. Scurvy killed more men on the seas than drowning. Gums rot; the skin ulcers; bones turn black. The circulatory system begins to rupture. Feelings accentuate, including melancholy and a desperate yearning for land. The sickness was even thought to be tied to nostalgia, dreams, ecstasy, terror, and fatigue, as well as diet. Sailors knew when one of them was touched by it and shunned him, lest they, too, fall under its spell. It had its own memory, resurrecting those long-forgotten injuries. It seemed to rise up from each man’s past. Sailors died nursing bloody lacerations they had received in their youth, mystified that being healed was somehow just a temporary condition.

  How might it be possible to reconstruct a lost person? To thread bone onto soul and muscle onto bone and skin onto muscle without creating a monster or a marionette. To rebuild a human being from photographs, documents, contradictory fragments of memories. The objects and impressions they left behind perhaps form a silhouette of negative space resembling a figure. A presence in the shape of an absence. Perhaps it is also worth establishing what first took people apart. To follow the unwinding thread.

  PART ONE

  Derry, 1984

  Longwave Radio

  God knows how long the radio had sat in the rain or where it had come from. My father, a man of few words, admitted it might not work, but we would never know unless we tried. He hauled it into his huge Popeye arms and carried it up the banking from the sodden ditch. I followed, clumsily, behind. We moved through the trees and along the rough trail at the backs of the houses. A dog barked furiously at the bottom of a gate as we passed.

  The Glen was a dumping ground, a wilderness that had once marked the edge of town but that the city had grown around, never quite absorbing, it being too steep and marshy to build on. Its wildness never defused.

  We turned onto our street, went up the concrete steps and past the railings. I thought my father, sleeves rolled up, veins bulging on his tattooed arms, might stop and place the radio into the discarded shopping trolley. I had watched the older boys swing each other around the car park inside the trolley, in great whooping arcs, but my father just walked on past. The glass glistened on the tarmac as I ran to catch up.

  For several days the radio just sat there on the living room floor, in the space where a television might be. I eyed it fearfully, suspecting it might explode or burst into flames when turned on. I knew what a radio was. It was a box with voices inside. A puzzle box. How did the voices get in there? Who did they belong to? How had they become detached from their owners? What if they escaped?

  My mother wiped down the wooden cabinet with a towel— “Your father’s always bringing bloody junk into this house”—then dried out the speaker with a hair dryer, filling the room with a hot, artificial smell. Then it sat there. Mute. Goading me into flicking the switch. I closed my eyes and braced myself.

  It started to life with a hum.

  The lid lifted slowly, almost hydraulically, and a series of colored lights blinked on, as if part of a control panel from a science-fiction film. It felt delicate, like a prized artifact and not a piece of junk that had been discarded. Somehow simultaneously futuristic and ancient, as if belonging to some advanced alien civilization that had long since died out.

  The dial creaked and then gave, gliding a red line along mysterious numbers and hieroglyphs. A horizontal bandwidth of places with unearthly sounds between each channel. I would tell my little sister, half-believing it myself, that they were transmissions from other galaxies, ones that I would later try to point out to her in my books—the spiral Andromeda, the starburst M82, the Magellanic Clouds—while she ignored me, busy rehearsing dance routines and reenacting musicals to invisible audiences.

  I had to steady my hand to tune in. There was always the garbled, disintegrating echo of a voice or music just before I could lock onto the signal precisely. Then, just as quickly, I would lose it. The slightest movement, a tremble, could knock it off.

  The marker moved along, through Paris, Cairo, Leningrad, Bombay, Peking. Some cities were out of reach, but occasionally I would catch a glimpse of the other side of the planet: the night side of the world, or the day side when we were enveloped in darkness. The slightest fragments of voices and melodies would conjure up images I’d seen in books—stave churches, karst forests, Hong Kong junks, torii gates, the shimmer of neon lights on rain-drenched streets—all appeared holographically in front of me, until my mother’s call from another room broke my hypnosis.

  I’d always return to the radio. First thing in the morning before school, last thing before bed. If I could unlock its secrets, everything in the world would surely make sense. Below the names of the cities were the transmitter stations, which sounded even more fascinatingly unreal: Petropavlovsk, Béchar, Motala, Dalanzadgad. It made me wonder which places were real and which were not—Gotham, Timbuktu, Transylvania, Atlantis—and what distinguished one from the other.

  There was something illicit about listening in. I felt like a secret agent prying into distant lands, where language sounded like verse, incantations, ciphers. Even the Eastern European football teams, some behind the Iron Curtain (which I imagined as a literal mountainous wall of rusting metal), had names that sounded impossibly enigmatic: Red Star Belgrade, Rapid București, Dynamo Kyiv. By contrast, there was little mystery to be found on the BBC channels. It was always gardening, mirthless comedy, interest rates, the ruminations of vicars full of dust and spiders. Except, that is, for the shipping forecast. There the mystery seeped in, almost despite itself. It was too late to listen most nights, but one evening while lying ill with a blazing fever on the sofa, a damp cloth on my brow, I had been allowed to stay up and had heard it. I would, from then on, at opportune moments, sneak downstairs when everyone els
e in the house was sleeping and listen with my ear pressed against a whispering speaker. And the radio would conjure up before me in the half-light night ships in Viking, Hebrides, Finisterre, setting course for Venice, Valparaíso, Yokohama.

  In the daytime I would lie there listening, staring up at the swirls and swishes of the Artex on the ceiling, sprawled on a mock-Persian carpet, threadbare but as detailed as any medieval manuscript. It was placed on the solid stone floor that I’d once split my head on, hyperactively flipping out of a baby-bouncer that had hung in the doorway. I had no memory of that incident and would not even know of it until, much later as a teenager, I shaved my head and found the scar, underneath all that time.

  The music I found on the strange, exotic channels fascinated me more than anything on Top of the Pops. I would listen to the songs in foreign languages, without ever knowing what they were called or who sang them or what they were about, aware that I would never hear them again. The transience and mystery made them seem precious, as if they ceased to exist upon finishing, or were lost forever and I’d have to walk the entire earth to chance upon them again.

  Before radar, the authorities in Britain would build huge structures out of concrete on headlands facing the sea. Acoustic mirrors. Sound waves would hit them and swirl around, and those standing within them could hear the hum of planes advancing, long before they appeared visually on the horizon. I lay there next to another kind of acoustic mirror in that little room in our rickety Victorian terraced house. Tuning in the radio, I would occasionally pick up police and army exchanges, quite by accident at first and then intentionally. There were invisible voices in the air. I would listen in to foot patrols, to the armored Land Rovers, perhaps even to the omnipresent helicopters droning high above our rooftops. At times their conversations, in accents familiar from soap operas, were discernible. At other times there were too many codes and numbers to make sense; the empire, with its lion and unicorn, moved in mysterious ways. Often the voices were calm, but sometimes they were frenzied. Gradually I became frightened of what I might be listening in to, for fear perhaps that it could listen back.

  At the beginning, though, it felt empowering. I felt that I was party to secretive riddles, like the characters in my picture books—Ali Baba spying on the forty thieves, the miller’s daughter who watched Rumpelstiltskin dance around a midnight fire, Jim Hawkins overhearing Long John Silver’s dastardly plots. I was listening in on the world of adults and slowly trying, slowly learning, to translate. At times it felt dangerous, especially when, as I knelt there hearing the patrols of soldiers speak among one another, I’d see their silhouettes walking, ghostly through the net curtain. I would exhale only after they’d passed.

  My mother noticed me once listening in—“Look at you, eavesdropping”—and, embarrassed, I immediately turned the radio off, wondering what an eaves was and how I’d dropped it. No sooner had her head turned than I sidled back, tuning in again, trying to catch the transmission, but it was once again lost. I did not yet know that glimpses were not complete access or revelation, that sometimes you uncover what they want you to uncover or things that are best left unheard.

  I was not the only person listening. My father listened in too. My mother would tell me so, years later.

  “It was a Sunday,” she began. “Your grandmother Needles used to come down for company. I’d keep her a bite to eat. She’d sit you on her knee. She was a sharp woman, no doubt about it, but affectionate, especially to you. I was waiting for her … we were waiting for her, and she didn’t come. I don’t know why, but I had this sinking feeling, like something was wrong—badly, badly wrong. She had no phone we could call, and neither did we, come to think of it, so … I don’t know, I just had this physical feeling. Not telepathy or anything like that, more a horrible rush. Like the start of a panic attack.

  “We’d no TV at the time. It’s stupid really, looking back. We probably could’ve afforded one, just about, on hire purchase. But we’d no real money to spare, and we definitely couldn’t afford the TV license. I was scared of those vans that went around with the radar dish on top and could tell if you had a TV. So we didn’t get one. They still sent threatening letters. They wouldn’t believe we didn’t have one. It was inconceivable to them. The silly thing is the inspectors were too afraid to come into Catholic areas back then, so we’d have been grand, but that’s hindsight. Instead, we listened to the radio a lot. And someone realized you could tune in to the army’s frequencies.”

  Until this point I had been listening absentmindedly, but at those words I turned to look at her directly.

  She continued, “You could get the gist of what they were saying if they were close enough by, and there was that watchtower, of course, up the street. That’s how your father found out. Secretly listening to the radio. That’s how he heard they were searching for someone in the river. That’s how we found out she’d gone in. His mother. Your grandmother. And that she was gone forever.”

  House Key

  An electric fire. Food in the pantry. A clothes horse. A sewing kit. A St. Brigid’s cross. A wireless. A doll’s house. All were burning. The lino floor was bubbling. A Bakelite phone was melting and dripping off the table. The beds were ablaze. The owners had already fled, to cries of “Fenian bastards.” They did not know the word pogrom before that night, but that’s what it was. Maybe they never knew the meaning of that word, because this was just something that happened. Undeserving of a name. The house, the houses—the entire street they would never return to—burned right through the night until the next day. Until all the things they’d owned, what little they had, were just smoldering ash and debris, charred imitations of what they had once been, in rooms with no roof, under a sky innocent in its ignorance.

  Map

  Contrary to popular opinion, you can read too many books. It did something to my brain at an impressionable age. It left me not quite adjusted to real life, always one step removed. An observer, always seeking out dramas, consciously or otherwise, but in a dislocated way. I would look out the windows of cars, buses, trains, and see the projections of cinema on the panes, rather than a solid world go by. It instilled in me a dangerous curiosity and an even more dangerous hesitancy.

  The world of books seeped into my life until the borders of reality seemed permeable. I would climb up the banisters of the stairs, hoisting myself onto the floor above like it was the rigging of a pirate ship. The stairs split in two directions. To the left were the other bedrooms, one of which housed the hot press and boiler, which would growl and splutter demonically at night. To the right were the bathroom and my bedroom at the back, colder than the rest of the house, as it was in an extension and there was no attic or insulation. The dry season does not last long here, and the flat tarpaulin roof turned the rain into music, lullabies. I lay for countless nights listening, as if in a cabin in a storm, a guest to the night’s own secret soundtrack. At the top of the landing was the huge, cavernous hulk of a wardrobe. It had dark, thick stained wood, and though it was massive on the outside, it was even larger inside. My mother had inherited it from a deceased great-aunt. It was filled with endless rows of moth-eaten, unworn fur coats. I would wander between them as if they created corridors, and eventually I would make it to the back. And then I would crouch down and tap the wood, as if a door might suddenly open if I tapped the right number of times, in the right pattern, to reveal a snowy landscape and a single Victorian gas lamp.

  I dreamt too much as a kid. Waking dreams. Eyes semi-glazed and mouth hanging open. “You’ll catch flies,” my mother would say, or “If the wind blows, your face will stay like that.” I was always floating off elsewhere, especially at the first sign of trouble or raised voices. Once, my mother came into the living room and saw me gazing up, spellbound, framed in a beam of light, and she thought for a second that her son was seeing some apparition of the Virgin Mary. I was watching a mouse very carefully climbing up the net curtain.

  Sometimes I would go out into the dank Dick
ensian backyard, where my mother used to place me as an infant in the basin, and pull out the spout from the kitchen to bathe and play in the running soapy water as she did the dishes. The yard had no exit door and was closed in by a high, decaying wall covered with cracks and moss. Shimmying up the rusted pole of the clothesline and then balancing dangerously on top, I could leap, grab hold, and pull myself up. There was a little alcove there, below the roof, where I could sit in all weathers, looking down on the gardens of the mansions behind, almost a gated community tucked away in an otherwise working-class area. I climbed up there often—my dog and trusty sidekick, Patch, far below, making tiny jumps to try to join me. It was like looking into another world, unreachably distant in time and space, except now and then, in the spring or summer, one of the visiting girls picking berries would wave tentatively, before her grandparents would chase her back into the house and glare at me until I left.

  I inhabited a place between fiction and reality, whether I wanted to or not, and so I tried to chart it. Like many children, I had long been obsessed with flags. Flags and maps. The hammers and sickles. The crescent moons. The suns. What could the symbols possibly mean? And yet there was order to it all. A fixity. This was the way things were and always would be. The German Democratic Republic. The Soviet Union. Yugoslavia. Only later would I learn of other flags. The flags of imaginary countries, like the starry plough and the sunburst flags I’d seen hoisted on neighborhood lampposts; and when I asked my mother what countries they were, she said, “None.” The flags of countries that once existed but no longer did. The Republic of Biak-na-Bato. Ryukyu Kingdom. The Most Serene Republic of Venice. All flags were temporary, in the long scheme of things, and depended so much on whether people believed in them or not.