Broken Things (Salt Modern Fiction)

by Padrika Tarrant

  Collapse

  THIS IS THE end of a world, seen in miniature, played out very slow. This is the moment of collapsing, when possibilities dissolve into what is.

  Her chest collapses a little more every time she exhales; she feels the weight of herself, airless; flesh and ribs and emptied lungs. Then, she gasps. The library is turning around her like some complicated experiment; as if every moving, coughing, reacting body is acting out some theory; every one of them just an atom.

  The new library is all made out of glass and nerves; the one they made when the old library burned. In the centrally-heated air, she can see the souls of millions of ruined pages; trillions of chittering, fire-eaten words. They pat against the filters like microscopic flies.

  The sound is making her nauseous. This is the very worst place to sit and understand the nature of things. Behind her, at the computer desk, a lady has sliced her thumb with the edge of a sheet of paper, and catches a drop of blood in her mouth.

  Broken letters are stirring in the atmosphere like tealeaves in water. It’s amazing that anyone can breathe. She’s thirty feet up, looking through a glass wall at another glass wall, with sky beyond that, and the church of Saint Peter Mancroft. Between the two is bitty air, and a long drop to the ground floor, and a place where you can get expensive coffee. Everything is new and shiny and hard, but the ground underneath is blackened ash.

  There are people everywhere, hundreds of them, talking or leafing through books or sipping espressos. Someone is standing beside the massive glass doors, hissing into a mobile phone. The television station’s here, too; one floor up, the walls are frosted and emblazoned with ‘BBC’. And there’s an angel in the foyer, waiting for somebody.

  The man who is about to die can’t find his library card. He’s at the head of the S-bend queue, and the zth of his shoes against the stainproof carpet sets his teeth on edge.

  He only slept an hour last night; he’s scared about work, whether they’ll renew his contract. He’s crap at his job, and everyone at the office knows it as well. Some day soon they’ll stab his back. As this crosses his mind, his turn comes up at the desk, and he stands in front of the librarian with his book between his knees as he ferrets in his wallet for the card.

  Then he finds it and pulls it out, and he is shamefaced and sweating and red, and the librarian says something friendly to him but he isn’t listening. He shuffles a few feet along, with his bag and his book and the card in his teeth, and when he’s out of the way, he puts the book in the bag and the wallet in his pocket and remembers to breathe.

  The man who is going to die sits down on a leather sofa, one floor below the Fiction department. He is so very tired.

  When you scatter tiny bits of metal over a magnetic field, the shapes of it unvanish; the particles mark out the pattern of the magnet’s force. So it is with the charred and floating letters: their darkness and damage collect on what’s invisible; unvanish it.

  So here it is, plain for her to see, hovering on unmoving wings, picked out by buzzing, charcoal letters. Its body is more insect than angel, but still, it is grasping a long slender sword in its claws, pointing it at the floor like a plumbline.

  And, she is staring, staring at it, trying to blink; it is half as tall as the vast foyer space. It’s hanging in the air above the floor; the shoulders and heads of passers-by sweep right through its feet from time to time. The letters knock out of kilter when they do, then they shudder back into place.

  Its face is from a renaissance painting, all aquiline nose and perfect, tousled hair and empty eyes. It shifts its grip on the sword a little, stretches out its shoulders. It is real. It turns the beauty of its face upwards, towards her, then back to the issue desk. It can sense her.

  The man who is about to die will fall asleep at the wheel of his car. The A11 will be closed for several hours, and it will make the front page of the Eastern Daily Press. He will be survived by his mother, and a wife who has been cheating on him. After the initial shock has passed, she will be quite chuffed to get the insurance money.

  The man who is about to die fishes for his phone, and finds that the battery has gone. Above his head, the woman in the Fiction department can feel the threading of his arteries and the weight of the coins in his pocket; she’s streaming tears for the man who is about to die.

  The lady on the helpdesk with the papercut is looking at her carefully, trying to decide if she should ask her if she’s okay. And, as she is looking, the crying woman gathers herself to her feet and goes right up to the glass balcony, looking through and down.

  The angel is gazing back up at her, curious, but then, the man who is about to die zips up his coat, ties his scarf around his throat. The paramedics will cut this off with scissors in forty-one minutes’ time. Heavily, reluctant, he begins to walk. He holds the bridge of his nose in his fingers as he goes; as he crosses the foyer, his head clips the heel of the angel.

  Slow and fast as a time-lapsed cloud, the angel turns in the air, marked out by the stammering, skittering words, and it drifts through the wall after the man who is going to die. The letters are stuck against the glass after it has gone. The crying woman stands very quietly and watches them go.

  Music

  RHODA HAD WOKEN to the sound of singing: far off it was, but insistent, like the drawling of the church organ heard from the market square. Rhoda was not given to music, or the church either, and the ladies of the Sunday school had given her up as lost before she was even in her teens.

  Nonetheless, there was music, low and aching, hurting her jaw and making the surface of her coffee tremble. When she removed her hearing aid, it was louder. Rhoda spent a long time ignoring it, frowning at her crossword and trying to make her biro work. After a minute or two of useless scribbling, she tsked to herself and put her reading glasses down on her bed.

  Rhoda began to search for a new pen, stirring her fingers among the knick-knacks on the dresser and the table. She discovered, as she did so, that the music altered as she moved her head: towards the right, it was fainter, but if she hung her head downwards and a little on the left hand side, it was unmistakeable, heavy and lowering like the music of soil. It upset her a little, shushed against her nerves.

  She turned abruptly and heaved open the top drawer. Beneath her underwear and stockings, Rhoda hid her valuables: pens, odd change, Murray mints. They stole from her, the care workers, especially that Tina; they rummaged among her things and they pried into her business.

  The previous week, they’d stolen her watch, the silver one with the pretty oval face, the watch that Thomas gave her on their very first Christmas. She’d confronted Tina, accused her outright; these days Rhoda always cried when she was angry, and she hated herself for it. They’d patted her hand like a silly old woman’s, and they’d made her tea and sat her in the day room with a box of tissues.

  Ten minutes later, Tina came in with a big malicious smile; they’d managed to get an identical watch from somewhere, just to fool her. Rhoda knew they’d taken the real one and sold it; she wanted to rage at them, shout at them, but all that she could do was weep. They’d opened the cabinet in the end, given her a tablet.

  Rhoda found another pen and held it close to her face to check that it was real. She’d made a little gouge in its plastic with the scissors; she had done with the whole boxful, so she’d be able to tell if they switched them while she was sleeping. The secret groove was there, sure enough; the pen was truly one of her own, but then she found herself distracted by the music again, by its calm urgency. It was growing sweeter somehow, and stronger too. Rhoda leaned forward to see if the sound was coming from her underwear drawer, but it wasn’t. She organised it with care, spreading clothes back over her little hoard, and pushed it shut.

  Rhoda rubbed her hands together. Her hands were dry, the palms a little shiny. She’d had to take her ring off last month as it was growing loose. She was worried tha
t she’d lose it, so she’d swaddled it in wrappers and hidden it at the bottom of a bag of toffees. The music was brushing against her skin like paper; she put her hand to her ear in case the music was coming from her body. For just a moment, she thought it was, but no, she was resonating with it, that was all. She thought of sea shells, of the way they whisper about the ocean.

  Rhoda turned in circles in the middle of her room, bobbing her head like a blind woman, and followed her ears out of the door. There was nobody in the dayroom and the television was off. There was no music here. It grew stronger in the corridor; a window was open, letting in the fresh air. Rhoda leaned outwards, breathed the drizzle and the traffic and closed her eyes. The window wasn’t singing. She stepped back a pace.

  She stood for a long time then, and the queer music grew louder still, just a fraction, the way that her wall clock woke her every morning with its flat tick-tock. She felt herself growing younger, more real, as if the chanting of the morning was calling her to some other place, some familiar place.

  Suddenly, Rhoda found she knew, and she followed the sound quickly, in case it should lose her. It pulled her along the service corridor, past the laundry room and into the scullery. There was a closet there and it was billowing music in dark, soft waves; utterly compelling, utterly beautiful. Rhoda wiped her brimming eyes and straightened her hair, and shyly began to open the cupboard door, like a child creeping towards the voice of her mother, singing hymns in the safe soft fug of the kitchen.

  Epiphany

  THE NIGHT BUS splits the city lengthwise, leaving ribbons of road that are jumbled with the haunches and elbows of houses. It isn’t dark, not among these blinkless, brainless streetlamps.

  The night is so hot, and it isn’t easy to breathe when you’re flashing past the lit and unlit windows, and all those children and tragedies and tiny prayerful hopes, scatter through your head like a strobe light. The night bus can’t go any more slowly, surely, because if it does then the tyres’ll get all glued up with the shouting and the sleeping and the twenty-four hour TV. My head’s spinning; if we speed up I think I might pass out.

  We turn a corner, and pass a playing field that has a murdered woman buried in it. She broke her neck in 1981, and oh, she is angry. All she has left to her name are the buckles from her shoes and her bones are singing like a finger against glass. She slips out of earshot in a minute more, and the silence is as vile as the last suck on a lolly stick; I shudder and chew at my nail.

  The babies are sleeping in the council estate, with their fists by their ears and their feet tucked against their tummies. A black and brown dog is on its last legs in a kitchen; someone’s making cheese on toast and crying.

  There is just too much life going past the night bus for me to process, and we’re going so fast, and I wonder if I’m going to scream, but at this moment, the night bus shushes to a halt at an empty stop. It sits quite still, exhaling poisonous fumes, but it can’t help it; we’re ahead of the timetable so we have to wait here. There are three whole minutes too many.

  Below me there’s a rat sprinting along a sewer tunnel. She stops abruptly, paused in mid step by a revelation. She has heard the voice of the god of rats, and now she is gazing straight up at the sky.

  She’s staring past the knotted guts of cables and water pipes; she is staring through the layers of the city: fat and skin and concrete and rainbow-oil in gutters. She’s staring, astounded, through all those blinkless brainless streetlamps and the metal skull of the night bus. She is staring right through me, inside my eyes, another sudden prophet, a seer of rats and lives and twenty-four hour TV.

  Gas

  THE MAN FROM the council smells like dirty bedding, and his hands are soft and white as bread. He’d like to wear a sovereign ring, but is afraid that it might make him ridiculous. It’s hot, he’s feeling it; he fishes a handkerchief from the pocket of his trousers and mops his face. He’s got a face like something skinned; his neck folds over the top of his collar, and it’s sore near the button, where the sweat collects.

  He missed that patch when he was shaving; this morning I saw him smearing it with Savlon, peering down his nose as he held his chins apart to see the raw bit in the mirror. The man from the council thinks he lives alone, but I quite like drifting through the walls of his house, picking amongst his private things. Sometimes I watch him when he is sleeping, spread out and sweating with the windows open, his arms over his face as if he were being mobbed by birds. He often dreams of falling downstairs.

  I know everything there is to know about the man from the council. I can see him right now, but he can’t see me. I can watch his lungs as they empty and fill. I’m more clever than the internet, me.

  The man from the council’s leaning on the jamb of my front door, shading his eyes with his hand and screwing up his face, showing his teeth, which are a browny yellow. He’s gazing at the frosted glass, trying to see through it, but it’s no use, all he can make out is the dewdrop pattern, and brown cardboard behind it. It’s written all over with spells, which are encrypted, of course.

  I am nowhere to be seen. In fact, I am lying on my kitchen worktop, serene and completely still, monitoring the universe through nerve-endings at the tips of my fingers. I have become a sort of god, but not one of the nice ones. It’s like watching CCTV, except that you can hear and taste and smell. It’s like being an atom cloud. It’s like being a bomb, exploding in slow-motion. It’s like being a dangerous gas. Mind you don’t choke.

  The man from the council has a bottle of Diet Coke in his briefcase; it’s warm and going flat. He glances behind him for a beat, and crouches to open the catches, laying it down against the floor in case the pens should roll away. He pulls out the bottle and gulps at it, then roots through bits of paper until he finds the sheaf that constitutes My Case; it’s quite thick. There’s a letter from City Hall that he has to discuss with me. It’s terribly important.

  He checks the flat number, although he knows it already. He looks toward the stairwell again; his heart has quickened slightly. The thought of me makes him a little afraid. The stairs that I make him dream of are made of poured cement.

  There are wet circles on his shirt, but he thinks he’ll be okay as long as he keeps his arms down. He tightens his tie, clears his throat and stabs at the doorbell. I pulled the wires out weeks ago; he can’t tell if it’s ringing or not. When I don’t answer after two minutes, he raps his knuckles against the door, where the bone is perilously close to the skin. I do not have the slightest intention of letting him in.

  Then he pushes back his sleeve to look at his watch, and wonders what he will have for lunch. He missed breakfast as he’s trying to lose some weight. Last month, I stalked him all the way to the hospital, and drifted among molecules in the Cardiology Department, as they told him the bad news. But right now, the man from the council is thinking about fries and cheeseburgers; this makes me laugh.

  Norwich City Council is a fine and upstanding body of individuals, who believe with impassioned fervour, that the economy of secure tenancy is based upon exchange. Money for flats; quid pro quo, as it were. This is all very admirable. The man from the council considers himself to be in a position of power; this both saddens him and makes him feel rather important. He has been very forbearing over the months, as he appreciates my difficulties and my complex needs. The man from the council is really very funny.

  But now, it has come to a point where there are tough decisions to be made. He plans to say that he must balance my needs against those of my neighbours’, who surely have a right to live in their homes in peace.

  He’s been worried about this meeting, bless him; he woke too early this morning because he was worried. He muttered what he was going to say under his breath as he smoked a cigarette in his car. He is here to help, you see, and eviction needn’t be considered as a death sentence in our enlightened age.

  For instance, the man from the coun
cil knows of a care home, on Silver Road actually, where vulnerable adults like myself can live in little flats of their own, virtually autonomously. There are trained, supportive staff, and in-house assistance with medication and bills and cooking.

  I am nowhere near as vulnerable as the man from the council; I can hear the labouring of his heart, the sinewy hinge of its valves. He clatters the letterbox this time, loudly, and then he looks at the sky. It’s just about to pour with rain.

  I like the spattering rain you get on hot days. When it rains really hard, the sound of it on the stairwell is deafening. The man from the council’s glad that there’re five more storeys above his head, because at least he’s got shelter.

  The kitchen counter is narrow, but not as narrow as me. The shiny varnish on the melamine is made of spilt black coffee with sugar, and it sticks against my skin. I tidied all the stuff off it last night, the kettle and all that, as I’ll not be needing any of it now; I threw everything off the balcony. I have been lying here for three hours, nine minutes and forty seconds. The gas fire’s on in the living room, unlit; the stove too. The hob taps make a rushing sound; a sort of empty hiss.

  The man from the council’s getting pissed off now. I knew he was coming today; he put a note through the door on Friday, saying that we needed a face to face talk. I read it without even opening the envelope. He looks at the stairwell again, and at the place next door; he hopes they’re not in, because if they see him, they’ll give him grief for not taking me in hand. They think that I poisoned their dog, and they don’t like the presents that I send them through the post. Someone keeps covering their doormat with bits of broken glass.