‘And do you trust people?’
Andy frowned. ‘Yeah, well, I don’t know if I trust anyone completely, and I don’t actively recommend that you trust me. I don’t think it’s a question of trust . . .’ He cast about for the words to express his ideas. ‘We all play different roles throughout our life. Friends become enemies and enemies become friends. You just have to . . . adapt your role.’
Adrienne was quiet, her eyes downcast, but somehow Andy had the impression that she had taken his avowal of universal distrust as stark honesty and deduced that she could therefore trust him. He did not attempt to correct this view.
The conversation continued on the soft back of the gas fire’s hiss. It was not long before Adrienne looked at her watch and announced she had to catch the bus. They stood. They had had enough time to feel there had been some significant exchange of friendly words, but not enough that they felt no regret that the talk must end so soon. Just to prolong the conversation a little longer, Andy went with Adrienne as far as the bus stop. There was little traffic and few passers-by. It looked like a lonely journey home for Adrienne. Just as they were being drawn excitedly along by the jokes and shared experience of the conversation, like travellers lost on a dark night, drawn on by a light, the bus rattled its melancholy bulk down the deserted road. They cut off the flow of talk swiftly and gave themselves to the reassuring words of farewell that suddenly seemed so vital. Then they hugged. The bus trundled to a halt in front of them and Adrienne stepped up into the yellow light inside.
***
Years had fallen away since then. Yet now Andy was back in his room at university. It was not the same room actually, but all these rooms were similar. Perhaps because he had been about to return to university for his final year, that evening with Adrienne felt as though it could have been a few days ago, or yesterday. The intervening years had been a dream while he slept on the train. Perhaps the refreshing blankness of the room also helped him to feel this way. When he woke up early in the morning, dressed, washed his face and tugged up the heavy blind by its cord, the light from outside set off all the whites and near-whites in the room. Andy stroked his pale, freshly shaved chin and looked through the white painted squares of the window frames. On the grass of the lawn had fallen yellow leaves from the trees. He looked back to the floor of the room, whose bareness was marred only by his papers and minimal personal effects. Was it possible to see daylight? Perhaps it was the way the panes of glass filtered it? Or was it the white bed sheets, the papers and the radiator that made the light itself seem visibly white?
Now the evening was drawing on and the air was almost of the same complexion outside his room as it was inside. Andy had come back to lecture the current students on their future prospects. He had told them about the possible futures that awaited them, but his present was this single borrowed room, essentially as bare as daylight, containing bed, desk, wardrobe, study lamp, a near empty bookshelf and a basin in the corner. After the lecture he had taken a look around the old town and been surprised by the memories that came back to him on the bridge or in the marketplace. It had been a very pleasant, solitary walk. Even though there was little time left he did not feel hurried.
Now, in his room, he went over the few appurtenances of his plan like a checklist. In a brown envelope on the desk was a manuscript. On the bedside table was a small bottle of pills. As important as these tangible items was a perfect chain of reason in his mind that was to come into its own now that Andy’s experience had described a full circle.
He had seen the world now. Not all of it, of course, but enough to make him realise how small it was; small enough for him to have under his belt, smaller than he was. Wherever he went nothing was waiting for him. This was why he could think about his plan so calmly and carry it out so calmly—because there was nothing else left. Perhaps his lack of concern meant that he himself didn’t really appreciate the full significance of what he was about to do. He thought about it as he looked around the room.
It had been on his mind for some time now, obviously. But when he had smelt the bonfire smoke coming from some allotments the day before, something had quickened in him, and when he had smelt the same aroma in a quite separate area of town it almost seemed to him a chance too good to miss.
The body had been his only home in this world. He had no other. He was a waster, he knew it. He had always been looking for something. It had been taken from him a long, long time ago. Surely he would have been happy just to live in his own private world. But the real world had intruded at an early age, and he had been helpless. School, work, eventually it was hard even to have private thoughts in his own time. The real world took up so much space, crowding everything else out, he had no time. How can one prosecute such a crime? He had been betrayed all the way down the line. Time betrayed him, trapping him in this ageing body. Even his body betrayed him with the need for sustenance that made him a slave to a pay cheque. And after all that he was reminded of his duties. The duty to survive, the duty of self-denial—and for what? So that others too can survive in self-denial! And worst of all, there was the duty to be grateful!
But he could beat the world if he was not afraid. All he had to do was prove that he didn’t need the world, by washing his hands of it. Then all power would be his and he would be in a place where the world could not get its own dirty hands on him. If he chose the right moment he could escape forever on the scent of bonfire smoke. Once he made the move and threw away the entire world, that other world of his imagination would return to him. He would be alone and a moment would be eternity. With his death decided time would become a tunnel of brown-leafed trees. He would be able to lay himself down amidst the leaf litter for the long hibernation. It should be the gentlest of all sleeps, the universe caught forever on the hook of the moment just before he slips into oblivion. But there were things it was hard to find out, and he did not know if perhaps, in his dreams, he would feel the horrid kick of death and know that darkness was ransacking his body.
Even against that darkness, though, he held an untrumpable card. It was a miracle, and it was as simple as wishing. All he needed to know was what he was dying for, and the darkness became insignificant. He was dying for—he looked again out of the window—for the beauty of that half-frosted spider’s web. Who would ever die for something like that these days—for a line of poetry, half a haiku? No one in such a disposable, business-like world. Maybe he was the last. And so he felt invincible, and so he was inspired to raise his last death-blessed moments in a silent toast and drain them.
When he swallowed a fistful of the pills and knocked them back with water it felt like the first truly spontaneous thing he had done in his life. That reaction between himself and the world he called beauty suddenly seemed to cling to everything like an after image. He had cleverly swivelled around all the beauty in the world so that it faced death at point-blank range. Death and beauty reflected and multiplied each other, like mirrors aligned. There was not one room but a million, jostling together in the same space at slightly different angles.
The whole thing was a conjuring trick. If mirrors face each other directly they must be empty. And so Andy kept relapsing into normality. He knew that the world had not changed. He had to wait now, and what should he do with this odd and ridiculous leftover scrap of time before something like eternity hit him? But when he felt the whole thing crumbling like that, he just had to remind himself; he was going through with it. That certainty was his weapon. Of course the world of his imagination did not come flooding in with all the fairies and adventures that had been left undone. That was not the meaning of eternity. He must be aware of those dreams at the periphery of his mind, just let himself be taken over by the excitement of the certainty, even if all that filled his vision was this undistinguished room and the sad, wind-cropped lawn.
In buzzing calm Andy walked over to the desk where the manuscript lay in the envelope. He picked it up and looked with deep satisfaction at a few words inscribed on it in
a careful but idiosyncratic hand.
Comparing Heights
by Higuchi Ichiyo
(Translated by Andrew Sullivan)
He had used a literal translation for the title instead of the other titles, ‘Growing Up’ and ‘Child’s Play’, under which it had been translated before. He was pleased with this. The letters left their transparent imprints on his retina when his eyes twitched. This translation was all he saw fit to bequeath the world. He only left this much because it was essentially someone else’s work. He was fascinated by the whole legend of this great lady of Japanese literature, who struggled all her life in poverty and died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty four; she left behind a slender œuvre which was nonetheless enough to secure her place in the history of letters. He drew the sheaf of loose leaves halfway out of the envelope and flicked through them, letting his eyes fall on phrases here and there. The words at the close of a paragraph seemed to echo in his head with the melancholy of a tolling bell:
Somehow, without her knowing quite how it had happened, a great river had risen up between the two of them, and all boats and rafts were forbidden to put ashore. Each walked along their own side of the river, occupied with their own sad thoughts.
He knew it all so well, he did not have to read it ever again.
Suddenly he knew why he had chosen this work, not that insights mattered now. It was because the work had not disappointed him. He had read of it when he knew little of Japan, and the brief appraisal had given him the impression of a sadness and beauty so rarefied it was near unbearable. It was the sadness of the blue air around a neon sign pale in the twilight of a dirty street, the sadness of things unnoticed. A vague daydream is always more exquisite than something clearly defined. But when he had finally read the story himself, he did not find the mist of the daydream banished by the particulars of the tale. It remained.
His travel bag was open on the floor, a towel hanging between the teeth of the zip like a lolling tongue. On top of the towel sat a cassette. On one side was Nick Drake, Five Leaves Left, on the other was Pink Moon, his final, rather spare and decidedly brief album. But there was no cassette player here, and Andy did not feel like putting on the earphones of his Walkman. It was enough to see the straight lines of the shiny plastic case, the titles written out in his own hand. He thought about the time when he used to wake up in a room like this every morning. His radio alarm was tuned to Radio 4 and the latest news would get tangled with his dreams as he dozed, like some great and ominous debate whose meaning he could not grasp. Even all those years ago he would wake up to the voice of some scientist or other cheerfully proclaiming that immortality or artificial intelligence or some other nightmare was within their reach. He remembered one in particular, talking about artificial intelligence the way he might have talked about the latest addition to his train set. He had had a very English, middle-class voice, dry and self-satisfied. It had been the voice of evil, surely? And to think of all that had happened in the world since then! Poetry could not exist in a world like this. It was an anachronism.
Andy could not stay in the room any longer. He had to feel the air on his body as destruction swilled in his guts, slowly breaking down the machinery of his existence.
Outside the main entrance he took long strides towards the lawns of a neighbouring college. There was a spring to his step, as if he were drunk. His own freedom now was that of the wind tilting invisibly down from the limitlessness of the sky. He could not walk slowly, as if he were in a hurry to meet someone. He walked between the outside of one wing of the college and a hedge, laughing irrepressibly, accidentally propelling drool from his lips as he did so. He felt loose and floppy all over and fought unsuccessfully to keep down the corners of his smirking mouth.
He came out into the grand but dreary stretch of car park, lawns and steps in front of the college. Near another of the college buildings two girls were walking. The temptation to confess what he had done to someone was almost irresistible, to see the look on their faces when they saw how clever he was. He was cleverer than the invisible man! But to tell someone would spoil everything. The perfection of his act came from the fact that he was rejecting the world utterly. He did not want to look back over his shoulder to see if the world would call him back or look after him regretfully. That was not the point. That was why he did not write a suicide note. Such a note would suggest he was still attached to the world in some way. As a matter of fact, he had thought about writing a note, but it was impossible to compose the perfect note. The perfect note must express infinity. The best expression of infinity was to say nothing at all. And so, now that Andy had summoned the strength to resist talking to anyone, his euphoria swelled over him once more, increased. It was a miracle. He was walking in the world, but he was beyond the world now. His stomach was so full of butterflies it was almost unbearable. He almost believed that if anyone tried to lay a hand on him now, the hand would go straight through him. He was free.
He half ran, half skipped over the dismal concrete, splashing shallow puddles here and there. The promenade in front of the college building narrowed to a driveway opening on a leaf-shrouded road. Opposite was an old, grassy cemetery, probably long disused. To the right was a T-junction, and beyond, fields. Where now? He thought. But just then there came the faint aroma of smoke on the air. It was almost too much. No doubt it was coincidence. But now, when there was so little room for coincidence in the time remaining, such flat affirmation of his final act was overwhelming. He felt a sudden stitch of impatience in his chest, and just as he had recently needed to quit his room for the open air, so now he felt he had walked too far out and could not wait to get back to his room and his self, enclosed once more in a private space. He cut his walk short. He strode back briskly, almost breaking into a run.
Back in his room he splashed his face at the basin. Something was accelerating. Something was closing on him. He was restless and masturbated without resorting even to the palest of fantasies. It was a purely physical act, and brief.
What was left? He paced the room. Something was troubling him, as if he had misplaced something. Finally he took an A4 envelope from his bag, uncapped a biro, and in an excited, shaky hand wrote out a list of names and addresses, taking pains to be meticulous even in his insuppressible haste. Even as he wrote he did not know whether he should be doing this. He trembled. Finishing, he was gripped by a desire to tear the envelope to pieces. Some unknown hand lay upon his heart, however, and the urge was calmed. He did not know himself whether what he had done was an act of spite or of tender sympathy. The more he thought about it, the less clear it became. Perhaps it was only this ambiguity that allowed him to leave the envelope intact atop the bedside chest of drawers. He had not violated the perfect air-tightness of his end.
He lay down on the bed, covered his face with his hands, and waited.
Adrienne went to the front door in her slippers and bent to retrieve the sheaf of mail. Even in her sleep she had heard the flapping of the letterbox and the thud of paper on the mat, and some intuition had told her she might have something to look forward to when she awoke properly. There were the usual bills and circulars, but her attention was caught by a long, yellowish envelope with the address neatly handwritten on the front. It had been sent to her mother’s address and forwarded. She did not recognise the handwriting, and when she tore it open she did not recognise the signature. David somebody.
Dear Adrienne,
You probably don’t know me. I’m a friend of Andy’s.
The first two lines seized her attention. This was not a letter from Andy, only about him. She could not imagine what its purpose might be. Perhaps life and destiny were finally about to take notice of her, even if only in some small way. This was the thought of a moment, but its underside was a panicky feeling and her eyes slithered helter-skelter down the following sentences, missing all their corners. She struck on the words, ‘verdict of suicide’, and had to start again. But before she could make proper sense of it sh
e knew she did not have to read any more. She knew that no other part of the letter could contradict those three words. In her heart the lid of a long-closed box suddenly sprang open and there leapt out a horrible, leering Jack-in-the-box. Its face was Andy’s. It had always been Andy’s. She realised at last. If lies had faces that was what they would look like.
A steel ball strikes another ball at great speed. The first one stops and the second one takes on its momentum. Andy had stopped still; now Adrienne was ravaged by tears. She ran back to the bedroom and threw herself on the bed.
At length the sun came up. She did not open the curtains. The room was stifling. Her ribs hurt. How cleverly she had been robbed, by someone whose part in her life had seemed almost incidental. The weekend was empty before her. When Monday came there would be work to do.
Contents
Morbid Tales by
Morbid Tales by
Contents
Foreword
The Mermaid
Far-Off Things
Cousin X
A Lake
The Two-Timer
The Tattooist
Ageless
Autumn Colours
Morbid Tales Page 26