by Sam Taylor
‘I come across it occasionally. Usually on trains. By accident one spring day I got the train journey described in “The Whitsun Weddings”, and some of the memories that came to him as he looked out of the window. But it’s all so vague and banal. Reading the poem is a much truer, more profound experience.’
‘That’s interesting,’ James said.
‘After that, I went in search of certain other poems. Visited churches, thinking I might get memories of how he wrote “Church Going”. Deliberately took a northbound train that stopped at Coventry, in the hope that it might inspire some memories of his childhood. You know, from the poem, “I Remember, I Remember”?’
‘I remember,’ James smiled. ‘The place where his childhood was unspent.’
‘That’s it. Didn’t work, though. I mean, I got the memory of having the memories, but not the originals. That’s the trouble with people who spend all their time thinking. They never actually bloody notice anything.’
James stifled a yawn, then went to the bar and ordered two pints. When he came back, the librarian was smiling at him in a strange way. Realising that he was expected to make conversation, James said, ‘Do you have any other memories related to Larkin’s poetry?’
‘Only one. The time when he wrote “Aubade”,’ the librarian said in a grave, slurry voice. ‘The one about death.’
James nodded. ‘A great poem.’
‘He didn’t think so. His fear was great, but he thought the poem was the palest reflection of that fear. As if, by putting it into words, even good words, he demeaned it. And it didn’t help with his fear of death. No reason why it should, of course, but I have the feeling Larkin thought it might make a difference; that in writing about the fear, he might also reduce it. But . . . no such luck: the fear got bigger in his later years, not smaller. He was still going to die, after all. In the end it was just another poem. Another drawing scratched on the wall of the mineshaft before the supports collapse and the black earth comes down.’
‘Good metaphor,’ James said automatically.
The librarian shrugged, modestly. ‘I get them sometimes. I suppose they must have been ideas he had but rejected. The leftovers. That’s what I get. The crumbs. I’d hoped his memory might make me a poet, but . . .’
‘It hasn’t?’
‘I write all the time, but it’s no good. Doggerel, really. Just crap.’
‘I’d like to hear some.’
The librarian stared at James balefully, mistrustingly, for a few moments, as though he thought this youngster was taking the piss. Then he recited,
Life is shit.
What’s the point of it?
The two men looked at each other for a moment. ‘Concise,’ James offered.
After that, the silences grew longer, the speeches sourer. Just before closing time, his story over, the librarian became melancholyand stared silently into his half-empty glass. James went to the toilet - as he stood up he realised from the whirling of the room how drunk he was - and when he got back, he found to his relief that the librarian had disappeared.
Back in the van, he undressed and got in the sleeping-bag. He was on the verge of falling asleep when the mobile phone started ringing. James pressed the green button, wondering who it could be at this time of night. ‘Hello?’ he said, but there was only a kind of hissing sound, as though the caller were somewhere remote, out of range.
‘Hello!’ said James. ‘Who’s there?’
The line went dead.
James woke early the next morning, before it was fully light. For some time he lay inside the sleeping-bag, staring at the grey ceiling of the van. He wanted to go back to sleep, but whenever he closed his eyes he saw the face of the librarian in the pub and felt a sudden panic. What had he been saying?
Finally James rubbed his eyes and got up. He plugged in the electric kettle. While the water heated, he stretched his aching muscles. Outside the sky was turning light and everything looked clearer, more solid. Already his memory of the previous night was fading, fragmenting. He thought about writing it down in his diary, but decided against it. I really ought to concentrate on the tasks ahead, he told himself, rather than worrying about some drunken conversation with a stranger.
It was cold and James desperately needed a bath and a shave. He resolved to go back to the student accommodation office that morning and ask again about renting a room for a few weeks. The office would not be open for another two hours, though, so when he’d drunk a mug of tea and eaten an apple, he got on the bicycle and set off to explore the residential streets near campus.
The houses with dark blue doors belonged to the university, and many of the numbers and street names seemed familiar - 52 Elm Road, 139 Cranbrook Avenue, 27 Mowlam Street. The hairs on James’s arms stood up as he passed these addresses. He was sure he must have been to parties there, perhaps stayed overnight with friends, but the blank painted doorways gave no clues, and he felt guilty, loitering outside, staring at the curtained windows. He feared somebody might call the police.
He rode up Green Avenue to the Happy Shoppa, where he bought a loaf of thick-sliced white bread. An Eric Clapton ballad was playing on the in-store radio. James walked his bicycle across the road and chained it to the fence, then went into the park to feed the ducks. This, he knew, was a waste of money, but he felt compelled to do it all the same.
James was the only person in the park. Half-formed memories swarmed around him as he stood by the large pond and tore off pieces of bread. He saw no faces, relived no events, but a feeling settled on him as he watched those white fragments arc over the dark water. A bittersweet, hollow feeling. It reminded him of the final weeks at Ingrid’s apartment, after she’d gone. The end of something; the beginning of something else.
When he had used up all the bread, James walked back across the road and entered Cathedral Street. He had lived here, his final year, in a single, second-floor bedroom at number 95, but looking at the building’s façade did not inspire any particular feelings. A vague emptiness, perhaps; nothing more. He cut through an alley, running his fingertips along the ridged planking of the fence; he had done this before, his fingertips remembered. On Hayes Street he turned right, walked back down to the supermarket, turned left on Green Avenue, and found himself at the top of Lough Street.
He stared down its length. Like all these streets, it was wide and rather grand-looking, lined on either side with parked cars and chestnut trees. The houses were Victorian, redbrick, three storeys tall. The majority were semi-detached. In front of each house was a small garden protected by a low wall, a hedgerow and an iron gate. The early-morning clouds had dispersed by now: sunlight flashed golden from the distant windows; it glowed green through the chestnut leaves; it sparkled in the constantly moving water of a distant fountain. This fountain, which doubled as a kind of ornamental roundabout, was the last object on the horizon. But beyond that, James knew, one looked into a perfect study of perspective, the two rows of houses seeming almost to merge as Lough Street narrowed to vanishing point.
Lough Street . . . James remembered how, when he first came to the city, he had pronounced it wrongly - to rhyme with ‘bough’. No, no, he was told, it rhymes with ‘rough’, ‘tough’, ‘enough’. Lough Street, Lough Street . . . he sniffed the air (a distant bonfire?) and kicked absentmindedly through the few yellow leaves that had already fallen to the pavement. They made a crisp, cheerful sound under his feet. His heart was quickening now, his chest tightening. His breath steamed before his face, even though James was sure that the air was not cold enough for this to happen. Imperceptibly, his coat seemed to have grown heavier, his ears and nose colder, the sun lower in the sky. For no apparent reason, a wind of euphoria blew through him, swelling out his chest, tickling the ends of his fingers, and little tears of exhilaration started behind his eyes. Life, the world, was before him, at his feet. He felt younger, taller . . . he felt glorious.
What was it? What was his body remembering? He had lived in this street, his fi
rst year, in a ground-floor bedroom at number 33; the room with the sloping floor. Yet it was not the houses that were sparking the sense of remembrance, he realised, but the fallen leaves. His euphoria faded and his legs grew heavy. James stood still and stared at the ground: yellow leaves, brown shoes, grey concrete . . . gravel, puddles, treeroots, grass. Everything magnified. The sound of a bird in an otherwise immense silence. The song came to his mind again: those few, haunting chords.
Part of my heart
Will always beat . . .
In the tantalising silence that followed these low-sung words, James felt time slow down and a sense of foreboding grow inside him. He tried to move forwards, but found that he couldn’t. He looked to his left, for dark blue doorways, but there were none. They were all, he remembered now, on the far side of the road. The odd-numbered side. He saw the first one and counted them off. Nine, thirteen, seventeen . . . Suddenly he stumbled, as if drunk, and the street scene lost its perspective: narrowing road, sun-reflecting cars, looming redbrick houses, all swirled together, close to his face. His body was lead, his head perilously light.
When he came to, James was sitting on a grass verge, leaning against a tree. The sun was in his eyes, so he closed them again. His neck and back and face were covered in cold sweat. His skin felt numb and fuzzy all over, as though he had somehow slept on all of his limbs at the same time, cutting off the circulation of blood. He reopened his eyes and tried to think.
What had happened to him? Slowly it dawned on him that he must have blacked out. He recalled the strange emotions that had filled him as he walked along Lough Street: the euphoria, and the way his breath had begun to steam, his coat grow heavier. You must have been imagining it, James told himself. No, you must have been remembering. For a moment, he felt a surge of hope at this realisation, but it was quickly replaced by another emotion as he recalled how the euphoria had faded and his body grown weak. What was it he had been feeling as time had slowed down, just before he lost consciousness? James didn’t want to think about it.
Gingerly he stood up, holding on to the tree trunk. His head was clearer now; his vision normal; the blood was flowing through his veins again, returning sensation to his fingers and toes. His muscles felt bruised, but that might just have been the night in the van. Careful not to look at any doorways, James walked down the road to where he had chained his bicycle and rode back to campus.
Mrs Quigley found him waiting outside her door when she turned up for work, a few minutes late. ‘Oh hello,’ she said, perhaps a little less thrilled to see him than she had been the day before. ‘You’re back quickly. How did it go, with the house I told you about?’
James explained about the application form, and the delay. ‘I was wondering if you could find a room for me.’
‘Oh yes, I’m sure we can manage that,’ she said, unlocking the door. ‘I racked my brains last night, you know, trying to think of that man’s name. I even asked my friend who’d told me about it, but she couldn’t remember either. I’m sure it begins with M . . .’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ James said. ‘You don’t happen to know the address, though?’
‘Yes, that I do remember. It was Lough Street.’
Without even thinking, James added, ‘Number twenty-one.’
Mrs Quigley smiled at him, amazed. ‘That’s right! You have been doing your homework.’
‘I used to live near there.’
‘Oh, did you? Good memories, I hope.’
I hope so too, thought James.
‘Now, there’s something else, you know,’ she said pensively. ‘Didn’t something happen in that house?’ She had put her bag down and was seating herself, slowly, as though she had a sore back, behind her desk. Her eyes were half-closed. ‘Some tragedy or . . .’
‘I don’t remember,’ James said quickly.
‘Well, it’s not important now, is it? What’s past is past. There’s no such thing as a haunted house. Not in real life, I mean. It sounds like a good deal to me. I’ll keep my fingers crossed for you. In the meantime, Mr Purdew, let’s find you somewhere to sleep.’
The house that Mrs Quigley found for him was on Newland Road, at the other side of the park, a mile or so from the municipal swimming pool. It was small for a student house - only four bedrooms - and he shared it with just one other person: a mature student called Graham, who lived there in term-time and clearly regarded James’s presence as an intrusion. Graham was a shy, bearded man with a strong Mancunian accent who seemed either to glare at James with hostility and suspicion, or to go out of his way to avoid him. In the four weeks James was there, the two of them exchanged no more than a dozen words.
It was a soulless house, and an awkward arrangement, but James liked being able to have baths in the evenings, and it was convenient living so close to the swimming pool. He would cycle there each morning and do twenty lengths. Afterwards he would buy bread and milk from the cornershop and eat breakfast in the empty common room, looking out at the chain-link fence and the neighbours’ garden. At ten to ten he would set off for The Polar Bear, where he would spend the day working on the wiring.
The landlord had called him on James’s third day in H. He was a tight-fisted, unpleasant man, but James needed the money - and the job itself was not difficult. The lounge was closed to the public while James worked there, so he was alone with the gloom and the smell of damp. Occasionally he would hear music and the sound of laughter coming from the other side of the pub, but it had a distant, dreamlike quality. Though James knew that he had been in this lounge many times before - though the room itself was deeply familiar - he did not remember anything new while he worked there. Somehow the cold, lonely present seemed to paint over the warm, peopled past. At odd moments, looking up from a fusebox at the empty lounge, he caught glimpses of what he thought must be memories: faces wreathed in smoke, tabletops crowded with glasses. But these mirages never lasted; they were gone in the blink of an eye.
He stopped at twelve for lunch, which he ate in the public bar. He rarely spoke to anyone. The bar staff weren’t friendly, and most of the other customers sat in groups or couples. There was one man, bald and bearded, who came in on his own and sat at a table near the window, but he was always busy reading, so James didn’t want to disturb him. He looked vaguely familiar, this man, but James couldn’t remember where he might have seen him before.
Unlike me, however, James does not remember much of this. What he remembers most clearly from that period - not in his mind but in the tensed muscles of his body - is the waiting. The torture of the unringing telephone. How its unringingness prolonged each second. Over and over again, James imagined pressing the green button on the mobile and hearing the voice of that charmless young man from Harrison Lettings, his tone altered now from contempt to respect. ‘Mr Purdew, I have the pleasure to inform you that our client has accepted your application. ’ Sometimes he varied the fantasy: he would be a fly on the wall of the Harrison Lettings office, watching the man receive a phone call from the client (‘Of course, of course, I’ll get on to it right away, sir’) or he would be a private detective, secretly pursuing the client down dark, zig-zagging streets as he approached the office building, then following him up the stairs and through the door, and watching as the young man’s face showed surprise and fear (‘But . . . I’m sorry, sir, I didn’t realise it was so urgent!’). The effect of these daydreams was narcotic. Each time he had them, James felt a slowly spreading happiness that got him through the next few hours of boredom. But as the days passed, he found he needed them more and more often, so that by the end of the second week he was living almost constantly in this happy, conditional future.
Outside of the daydreams, he could hear nothing but the phone’s tormenting silence. He carried the mobile with him everywhere in the daytime; it was always switched on. Each night he plugged it in to recharge the battery. And when it did ring (cold-call salesmen, wrong numbers), the hope that flooded his chest was, if anything, worse than the silent
waiting. James had so little then - no friends, no home, no lover, no clues - that his hope expanded to fill the vacuum. But hope, I can tell you, is an exhausting emotion; perhaps, along with fear, the most exhausting of all. It is like juggling eggs: the hope is the shell, and inside is despair. A single crack and the despair might spill everywhere, stain everything.
And then one day, a fortnight after he came to the city, James discovered a new opening in the labyrinth. It was a Sunday; he had already been for a swim and eaten breakfast in the common room. He was doing the washing-up when he noticed a newspaper on the windowsill of the kitchen. Graham must have left it there. James dried his hands and picked it up. It was the same tabloid he had seen that first day in the café on University Road. Curious, he opened it to the page with the stars. This is what he read:
CANCER 21 June-22 July. Things are looking up, so why are you feeling down? Saturn, the planet of work, is dominating your chart. But don’t worry, that is about to change. The news you are waiting for will come when you least expect it. Now is the time to forget your hopes and confront your fears. Beware of the letter M and the number 21.
James felt a sense of relief as he read this. Relief, but also anger at himself. Ever since his last blackout, he had been trying not to think about the dread that had risen in his chest that day as he walked up Lough Street; about the numb recognition he had felt when Mrs Quigley mentioned ‘some tragedy or . . .’. He had cycled past Lough Street twice each day, yet never even glanced in its direction; it was as if the street had been erased from his mental map of the city. Yet in suppressing his fears - and daydreaming instead about a phone call that might never come - James had, he realised, been wasting time, and ignoring the biggest clue he had yet found. Whether it was pure chance or some mystical insight that had led the astrologer to write this was beside the point, James thought. The advice was good: now was the time to confront his fears.