by Jonathan Lee
One of my mistakes is I probably ask things in the wrong way. When I see people like Miss Stephens asking things they have a way. A way with large dark eyes and a decisive neck of getting people to listen. I always look at her on the treadmill her cheeks blushing just the right amount and think how unaffected she is by her brilliant looks. They seem to have a very small effect on her if that makes sense. By which what I mean is it is in others you can see the big effect. The way Jack smiles at her complete in his attention saying yes to everything. The way he disappears into a sort of tunnel of her making.
If you are thirsty I could go and get more water? It really is key to stay adequately hydrated. I was reading an article about hydration in Testomuscles Monthly. The marathon special issue. It had advice for treadmill training too. Pulse pace calories incline distance speed time. It is important to monitor these things. Like the final run Miss Stephens did for me. I monitored her heart-rate and it went very high. I was worried for a moment.
Yes. That was the day that Miss Stephens went into the coma. When I saw her around midday for a last-minute PT session. But my mistake had nothing to do with letting her heart-rate get high. My mistake came later. It came when I saw her for the second time that day. Not the third occasion which is when she went over the railing. No. It was the second time. Number two of three.
It was 3.35 p.m. I think when the trouble began. It must have been 3.35 p.m. because I had just completed my biweekly review of the lost-property cage. The review can be brilliant sometimes. In past years we have found among the T-shirts and socks a prosthetic foot a stuffed fox and a mains rechargeable scrotum-hair trimmer. But that day there were only half a dozen T-shirts and socks to add to my inventory so within a few minutes it was complete and I was heading to the towel room. The towel room is where I go after the lost-property cage before then circling back to the gym to give the equipment the end-of-week wipe-down with the blue spray. But as I was walking along the corridor I saw Miss Stephens. She was just inside the goods entrance. And Barbara her PA was there too. Jack calls her Battleaxe Barbara but her weapon is in fact a stick.
I do not think Barbara or Miss Stephens saw me. Miss Stephens was crouched over. She had her head in her hands and Barbara was standing over her holding some clothes on a hanger. I think Barbara was trying to stop Miss Stephens crying. I do not like it when people cry. The way it melts their face. Crying is not how people are supposed to look. And when Miss Stephens finally stood up I saw she was muddy. Normally she looks brilliantly clean but her clothes were very very dirty. I decided to stop monitoring her. I went to the towel room as planned.
I unlocked the towel room. Have you been? It is a warm safe place. All the nice clean towels are always hanging and drying completely white. It is lemon-fresh in there. And I went to the nook in the far corner as I always do and settled down. There is a kind of lemon-fresh lack of mess about the place. A simplicity. The kind you could get for a small while in the Raj bathroom if you really really scrubbed. I took out the little zip bag. I keep a small zip bag lodged by the boiler. I took out my antibacterial gel. And the antiviral gel. I…
OK.
It is not that it is just I do not want you to think…
I sometimes do this. Go in and unzip the gels so as to then cover my hands and lower arms. Purely as a precaution. To ensure cleanliness following the lost-property review. In case I have handled unpleasant socks or touched a hair trimmer in non-refundable condition. But while I was applying the gels I could not get Miss Stephens out of my head. Muddy. Crouching down. Crying. All that usual power she has that I wish I had even a shadow of. All of that gone. Later that Friday doing her speech she looked clean and pretty again drawing people into her eyes with that way she has but at this stage of the day when I committed my latest mistake she was out there looking muddy and sad and I could not shake the memory of her. So to try and shake the memory I did some counting. Just a little quirk I have. Nothing important but sometimes it is very nice to sit somewhere quiet and dark and count to seven. Perhaps try it. One two three four five six seven. You may think it is strange but it is just a little thing I do in the towel room sometimes after applying the gels. One two three four five six seven. A very small thing to relax. Some people smoke a cigarette but I like to count.
Rules?
Oh no rules. Except. Well. The only definite thing about the counting is that I have to do seven rounds of seven. That is very important. And sometimes as in the case of that Friday I have a propelling pencil in my hand. To tap out the seven on my knuckles. It would be a mistake however to think the pencil is always present. The important bit is to do the gels and the counting. I mean none of it is important it is just a little habit after all but after the gels and counting I can go back to the gym and spray down the equipment with the blue spray and everything will be brilliant again. Does that make sense? Do I sound very insane?
Thank you! OK. That Friday afternoon I am in my hiding place and I only achieve three rounds of seven with the pencil when the door creaks. The door creaks and a shard of light comes in. The light is beautiful in a way but it shows up a lot of dust which I did not know was hanging in the air. This is less than brilliant. I am not a supporter of dust. And also less than brilliant is the fact that I must have left the door unlocked. This fact justifies the thousand previous times I double-checked thinking I had forgotten to lock but actually I had. It gives sense to all those times I checked and checked so I know going forward I am going to have to build extra lock-checking time into the schedule. I am not complaining. I love my job. But the schedule is already very terribly tight you see? And anyway the door creaks. And the light comes sharding in. I see shadows. I hear two people giggling. One high giggle. One low. The low giggle is similar to the unusual noise Father makes if Mrs Hasan from Flat 15 says something amusing on our way to mosque. And then the light sort of shrinks but is still there a little. And the lock locks from inside and the one with the low voice says something very strange.
I think he says.
He says. Says something like I fancy.
Yes. I fancy Peter the Great is going to enjoy it here. He says that which is perhaps a Russian reference or something of that nature? And then between two hanging towels I…well…I glimpse the lady kneeling down.
Act Two
COLOUR HER HAPPY
…’twas all one; – in whatever form or colour it presented itself to the imagination…
Laurence Sterne,
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
2.05 p.m.
WITH JANUARY clouds closing in low on the road it doesn’t feel like 2 p.m., more like 2 a.m., the narrow slice of night in which everything has a smudged, unreal feel. This is it, the long-planned trip that will clarify all her confusions, and yet it feels so insignificant and vague – a small-hours stagger for a sleepy wee.
‘Wherebouts on de Heath you lookin on?’ her dreadlocked cabbie says.
‘Near South Hill Park,’ Joy replies, horrified to perceive a hint of imitation in her accent. There is a song on the radio about New York – Tribeca, Harlem, Knicks and Nets – and the waves of pure, colourful sound wash up piecemeal memories of her seven childhood years there: taxis that are yellow not black; her dad’s unabated insistence on his girls saying ‘cars’ not ‘automobiles’, ‘petrol’ not ‘gas’; birds perched in the wires of Brooklyn Bridge like notes on a musical stave. One of the last times she was over there the news reported an al-Qaeda operative’s plot to bring the bridge down by blowtorching through each supporting cable. You hear a lot about these highly sophisticated terrorist networks, but Joy struggles sometimes to shake that image – a scrawny guy on a hopelessly big bridge, his weapon of choice more useful for a crème brûlée than a terror attack. The rap music continues, wordplay linking and flowing with rests and gear changes that generate an oddly smooth structure.
In the back of the cab she clutches her M
arc Jacobs bag. Through the window she sees other designer bags glide by. Make-up, BlackBerry, cigarettes, chewing gum, keys, iPod, tissues. She once asked Christine and some other girls from work if they found it funny, the way all of them bought the same bags from the same shops and filled them with the same stuff, but they just did the ‘she’s mental’ eyebrow raise and changed the subject. People are so unknowingly identical in what they sling around their necks it makes Joy feels queasy sometimes, as if she alone is in possession of certain intense secrets about the way the world is arranged. She wonders if any of the other intermittently visible Marc Jacobs bags contain, in addition to the usual, sedatives and a suicide note. Maybe even these contents are not unique. The taxi turns and climbs a road lined with expensive Hampstead houses in pastel shades, a stucco staircase leading up to the sky.
As she falls asleep in the woods today her few true friends will fall, oblivious, into different things: married men’s beds, sunloungers in the South of France, those little tubs of organic falafel. She has no doubt they will be better off without her. You can hear it in their long silences and sighs, their repetition of comforting clichés, the requisite reminder that Things Could Be Worse: you have become a burden.
She checks her pills, hoping they are strong. She refolds her note, hoping it is kind. She zips her bag, closes her eyes, swallows down a stubborn knot of sadness.
Lump in your throat. Joy never used to understand the phrase. But then when she was twenty-three her father, having his weekly shave, found a lump below his Adam’s apple. He had become wealthy by investing in pubs and clubs, Brooklyn’s only traditional English boozer to start with and then, in the nineties, the sorts of Soho nightspots frequented by It girls with mono-nostrils. Before all this he’d pulled pints and saved pennies, and if someone on the darts team he joined when Joy’s mother finally agreed to move to England said his story was one of rags to riches he’d always, always say it was more like lads to bitches. He was famously thick-toned from years of raising his voice above the clatter of glasses and chatter of crowds, so his GP found nothing unusual in his patient’s hoarse hello. And he felt no lump in his throat. ‘Nothing,’ the GP said, ‘nothing at all.’ A touch of hypochondria at worst. So, proud and private and not one to seek help twice, Tony Stephens (Anthony if you wanted to talk business) took himself home. He phoned Joy and said all was OK and asked what the best thing was about her new job, and only half joking she said, ‘Nothing, nothing at all.’ The following June he put a pistol in his mouth and blew a hole in his head. The autopsy showed advanced thyroid cancer. They said it must have been a struggle to swallow or sleep. And Joy, hearing this news, already spending each night wandering through the rooms of her own mind looking for a place to rest, worrying about her career choice and lack of boyfriend and the two pounds she’d put on since spring, felt nothing ahead of her, a doctor’s mocking nothing, the nothing she did, the nothing she could do. You spend your life distrusting clichés and then they come true. Lump in your throat. Sick to death. So close you can taste it.
Death by misadventure. Coroner’s sensitive verdict. Thought it possible the trigger went off accidentally, while he was cleaning his gun. Joy’s sister, whose soaring career in PR had already left her depressed by second-rate spin-doctoring, responded most succinctly: ‘Interesting choice by Daddy: to clean a gun with his tongue.’
From the moment she started planning this day she knew she didn’t want to go by gun. Nothing noisy, nothing messy. She didn’t want to jump in front of a Tube train either. You were screwing with people’s schedules, not to mention the driver’s mind. And it seemed a bit mean to rent a car just so she could fill it with fumes (plus it raised all sorts of new questions: how expensive do you go? hatchback or saloon?). No, what she needed was somewhere quiet, intimate, but at a distance – not her home, not her office. And then it clicked: the Heath.
It really is a nice handbag and maybe she should have left it for Christine to say sorry for the cancelled tennis and all the other unspoken stuff. No one will want the bag that accompanied the corpse. She should perhaps have brought her fake Fendi instead, a souvenir from a distant trip to Morocco where, amid the cries and shouts of market life, the barking of unchained dogs, the bird squawks, the voices of men calling out ‘Asda prices’ in cultivated cockney accents, she got ripped off but still felt good. Started to feel good for the first time since her dad’s suicide. Except when she looked at Christine. On that holiday she did not feel good when she looked at Christine.
‘You sure bout dis?’
She has given the driver a tip that’s bigger than the fare.
‘I’m sure,’ she says, stepping onto the pavement. ‘It’s yours. Have a good day.’
As she slips into flats he winds the window down.
‘Hey,’ he says. ‘Everybody have problem.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘What I say, girl. Everybody have problem.’
He leaves this message hanging in the exhaust fumes and eventually she walks away, wondering.
By the time she reaches the gate, her fingers are swollen with cold. They ache when she presses them against the rough wood. The gate swings back with a groan and she steps forward, passing from the Heath into a private back garden shared by three homes. A few metres in front of her are some low hedges, then the curve of a familiar stream, and beyond that, over to the right, where grass stops and patio begins, the house she lived in between her seventh and eighteenth birthdays, now occupied by her sister. The walls and windows, aged five years since Joy last saw them, still look in fair repair. Before marrying Dennis Joy rented the top floor of a period conversion one cul-de-sac further back from the Heath than this one, and if you stood on tiptoes in the study, where the wall became the window, you had a weak sightline across the road and into the loft conversion her father finally got sorted the year before his death. It has since been reverse-converted back into a loft. To Joy this seems, like almost everything, to be a metaphor for modern life. After decades of wanting to turn storage spaces into living places we’re going the other way again, realising the value of hideaways for all the odd lonely debris from our lives: notes from estranged friends, impulse purchases, deferred DIY.
Her sister’s husband – a fat, forgetful man who is nonetheless an expert joke-teller – likes to tinker with motorbikes in a shed which stands on his side of the garden (too close, the council once claimed, to the property’s perimeter). One such machine leans out of the shed door now, shiny black plastic caping it from the cold. She lurks behind one of the low hedges and a smell of petrol – or is it diesel? – reaches her through the intricate circuitry of twigs and brambles. As she crouches here, breathing hard, the coastal sound of traffic drifting in over rooftops, over satellite dishes cupping clouds and aerials raking sky, this scent from Jamie’s bike shed begins to mingle with something deceitfully sweet, almost like fresh-cut grass, a suggestion that spring is much nearer than it is.
Joy means only to survey the scene from a distance and then get on with the day’s business, but hearing laughter and a dog’s barking she becomes intrigued – she didn’t know they had a dog – and while lining up little things she’ll say if caught she passes through a gap in the hedges and steps over the stream, watching out for frogs. There are no frogs, of course, just water which trickles so slowly over rocks it seems afraid of getting hurt. Excited by her own prying she moves past the children’s swing and a smaller-than-remembered pond and lingers behind a tree. Dad, a fair-weather believer just like his daughters, used to say God was a great follower of fashion and that the lowest branch of this tree, dipping dramatically over the roof, was His moustache: in June the Almighty liked it Burt Reynolds bushy; in January, smart Clark Gable was the thing. The seat of the swing wears an inch of dirt. It shares with the leafless branches all around a lonely look inherited from winter. False expectation – maybe her sister will see her, run out, say Thank God you’re here, I’ve wante
d to get in touch – makes her heart beat childishly fast.
Then she sees her. The living-room window is a box of light in which she plays. Not her sister – a little girl, playing the piano. She heard they had a little girl. It was some small measure of comfort to hear that, fresh dressing on a wound. The child is not really playing the piano, admittedly; it’s more a case of pressing one key repeatedly. Joy takes another step forward. She is pleased she has had the chance to see her niece. It doesn’t matter that it is from a distance. The distance is a safe distance and even a step or two more would probably be OK. The tinkling noise the piano key makes acquires bass from the barking of the unseen dog and, desperate to see more, Joy takes three further steps, almost out in the open now, risking being seen. The little girl looks – can it be true? – a little sad around the eyes, like she’s inherited some of her mother’s mournfulness, but Joy’s mind must be trying to find signs of misfortune in the face, mustn’t it, for you can’t inherit a trait borne from events.
The back door opens and a brutal-looking dog totters out: black, heavyset, carrying too much skin. A hairy arm puts food on the patio. Were Jamie’s arms ever that hairy? The door snaps shut and with its balls swinging magnificently the dog bends into the bowl.