SO, TEN DAYS. Three more than God needed to create Heaven and Earth.
Never believe anything, my father used to tell me. Accept the truth of something only when you have absolutely no choice, because the evidence is so overwhelming that it’d be ridiculously perverse to interpret it in any other way. But nobody ever stabbed him in an alleyway, or if they did he neglected to mention it to me.
Briefly, only for a bare instant, I toyed with the idea of a holiday; travel, distance, going a long way away. Instead, I decided to press ahead with my plans for redecorating. I bought woodchip, emulsion, undercoat and white gloss for the woodwork, polyfilla for the windowframes and any cracks that might come to light in the plasterwork, and four of those wonderfully ingenious foam paint pads. They have a socket on the back so you can stick in a broomhandle and paint ceilings without pratting about on ladders. A wonderful idea, and so simple.
The smell of paint turns me up. From time to time this caused problems, between me and my wife. The house reeked of thinners. I swear, it must’ve soaked into the plaster (porous, so they tell me) because every now and then I catch a lungful of it, and I start coughing and have to swallow repeatedly to keep from throwing up. I’m hopeless with names, but I never forget faces or smells.
Emulsion, however, isn’t nearly as bad, though I don’t like it much. I did the ceilings first, mostly for the fun of sticking a broomhandle in the little socket, also because I wouldn’t have to move any furniture, or touch the paintings. You’re supposed to put down old sheets to stop drips on the carpets, but I looked and we didn’t, I didn’t have any old sheets. So I used new sheets instead, and they seemed to work just as well. I got a bit light-headed from all the staring upwards, a thing I don’t do very much in everyday life, and a definite crick in the neck, and when I thought I’d finished I realised that I’d missed lots of patches. You only notice when you move position and the angle of the light changes, and there are bits that don’t gleam.
A couple of hours of that, and I decided I’d done enough to be going on with. That brought me to a disconcerting full stop. Let me explain. Ever since she left and I found out about the room and became a shape-shifter, I’d been busy, all the time – as I’d told my agent, never a break or a day off in five years. She kept getting me work, you see, one job treading on the previous job’s heel, all that lovely money, deeply ingrained vestiges of the Protestant work ethic, though my parents were both atheists and I’ve never given the matter a moment’s thought. So either I was getting ready for a job, doing a job or coming down after a job, brittle and shaking and needing all my reserves of strength and energy to do the simplest things, like boil a kettle without scalding myself to death. Accordingly, come half past nine in the morning and nothing I had to do, I was at a dead loss, a ship stranded half a mile up the beach, a whale out of water. What do people do? Read a book? I have many fine books, but I read between 10pm and midnight. More decorating? I’d stopped doing that because I was tired out. When I get back from a job, mostly I sit in the room and stare at the walls for a long time, as though I’d just run ten miles.
I found myself in the room, though I don’t remember going there. I sat and looked at the wall, though fully aware that I’d done nothing to earn the privilege. What on earth had possessed me to demand a holiday? No idea. A vague suspicion that it had had something to do with being stabbed, though it’d be hard to construct a logical connection between the two. A holiday, for crying out loud. What next? A pension scheme? A health plan?
My father’s genius theory was all to do with space. Not the black stuff between the stars, or not that kind of space exclusively; it was vaguer than that, but utterly precise, being made up mostly of equations (there’s no scope for vagueness in algebra). Towards the end of his life, after it had been disproved, he liked to refer to it as his TARDIS theory, because it was all to do with the boundaries between insides and outsides. He believed, was convinced that between the inside of a three-dimensional shape and the outside, there was a third space – cavity wall geometry, he called it – and that that space was neither the objective looking down, so to speak, or the subjective looking up (assuming that the boundary in question is a roof or ceiling, the outsider’s roof being by definition the insider’s ceiling) but another kind of space, defined and controlled by a geometry very similar but subtly and crucially different from the usual default system; like doing a page of sums thinking they’re in base ten, when in fact they’re in base eight.
Indeed. I couldn’t make head or tail of it either, and if you didn’t know my father you’d assume he’d been drinking. But he had pages and pages of equations, and when he ran out of paper or got particularly enthused he’d start writing his calculations on the walls, which got us in all sorts of trouble with landlords over the years. He said writing on the wall was a sort of poetic-ironic statement, that his theory could only be properly expressed if written on a wall, on both sides of a wall simultaneously, and on the insides as well... Then he’d start on about the two sides of a coin, how something must be either one thing or another, but what about those occasions when the coin comes down on its rim and balances, like the crucial moment in Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern? Usually by that point I’d given up and was thinking about something else; but I did read the play, the day after his funeral, and I think I can see a bit of what he meant. Another quotation he was always coming out with was, “‘The earth hath bubbles as the water hath, and these are of them’”, which I think is from Macbeth; in which case it’s something to do with witches and the supernatural. He told me once, “Another thing my theory explains is beauty, and why it’s only skin deep.” That struck me as extremely profound, until I thought about it.
IT TAKES ME quite a lot of effort to leave the room once I’m there, which can be awkward, since I tend to gravitate there when I’m not doing anything else in particular. That was a case in point. I’d started out full of splendid intentions, hell-bent on decorating. My resolve held good long enough to get the ceilings done, some of them, anyway. Then, without really knowing how or why, I was back in the room again. And on my day off, too.
This won’t do, I told myself. I stood up, hesitated – it was almost as though I was waiting for someone to pipe up and object, a sort of just-cause-or-impediment moment. Nobody did, of course, so I bestirred myself – splendid old word that perfectly describes what I’m like sometimes – and went out into the front room, which had been her room, where the paintings still were.
And here’s an interesting fact about carrot-flies. Devastating little buggers, so they tell me, they’ll wipe out a crop of growing carrots as effectively as locusts or nuclear war; but for all that, they can’t fly, they’re physically incapable of flying, more than three feet off the ground. Above that, presumably, altitude sickness or the unbearable weight of gravity does them in; so if you want to protect your carrots from the fly (so I’m reliably informed) build a wall round the carrot patch at least three feet and one inch high.
Like me and the paintings, faces turned to the wall. They represented an absolute barrier, as far as I was concerned. I couldn’t fly over them. Which was ridiculous, really. I knew the room would never be mine until I’d painted its walls, overlaid them with a thin but complete outer skin of myself, and I couldn’t paint the walls without shifting the paintings – which were three feet one inch high, and therefore an impassable barrier, like the Maginot Line or the galactic core. Silly, I told myself. They’re not hot, they’re not heavy, quite possibly they’re not wired up to explosives. I can pick one up ever so easily – like this...
And then I felt a complete fool. I guess, rationalising, that what I’d been so pitifully scared of was the images on the obscured side, the painted surface, my wife’s work, the evidence of her existence and her very essence. But the canvas I’d picked up was blank. So, it turned out, were all the others. Blank, unused.
I know nothing about the painter’s craft, so I don’t know why you’d carefully stack y
our spare canvases against the wall. Isn’t there some process called sizing, where you slap on some sort of invisible undercoat – I think it’s made out of boiled-up rabbit skins, which strikes me as grotesque – for the actual paint to grip on, or something? Maybe she’d sized all those canvases ready for use, never got to use them. In which case, where were all the finished paintings? Presumably she’d sold them after all. Ashamed to admit, if she had, there was no reason to assume I’d have heard or known about it. When I was home and she was working, I’d go and bury myself in the room, for fear of getting under her feet.
In any event; shameful though my ignorance and the fear it had engendered undoubtedly were, there was now no reason why I shouldn’t stack up all those blank canvases neatly in a corner and proceed at once with Operation Decor. So that’s what I did for the next three days, pretty well non-stop and round the clock. It’s amazing how much you can get done, once you set your mind to it.
I PAINTED TO Bruckner symphonies and Die Frau Ohne Schatten, but I wasn’t really listening. My mind kept gnawing away at the big unsolved mystery: why had someone stabbed me? Was it me he’d been trying to kill, or the other man? Was he liable to do it again?
The more I worried at the problem, the more work-hardened and intractable it became. I achieved no new insights beyond the paradoxes I’ve already mentioned. I spawned a few hypotheses, but demolished them as thoroughly as a mathematician exploding a false premise. All I got out of it was a fine foamy lather of anxiety, together with a reinforced conviction that something was badly wrong, and I’d be a fool to resume my everyday life without sorting it out, which apparently I was incapable of doing.
Even the longest river (another of Dad’s quotations) winds safe at last to sea; eventually, even Bruckner shuts up, and there’s no more walls left to paint. I can picture myself at the moment of culmination, laying down my brush and looking round to see nothing but gleaming surfaces, uniform, pristine and wet, which meant I couldn’t interact with any plane in my dwelling except the floor until everything had dried off. Also, the air was foul with volatile solvents, so that I could scarcely breathe. A wise man would’ve gone out. I went into the room.
Forget to mention, I decided against redecorating in there. After all, it didn’t need it.
Hungry; I ate the other half of a sandwich I’d started earlier. I turned on the computer and checked my bank balance, which was grating against the red line like a loose exhaust. I played a dozen games of Tetris, turned it off and read a book, a history of the founding of the state of Texas for the general, non-scholarly reader.
I don’t do well when I’m not working. I can’t seem to switch off.
I FIRST MET her at a tax planning seminar. Back then she had no idea about being an artist full-time, it was just a hobby, the thought that she could actually make a living at it had never crossed her mind. I decided that encouraging her to fulfil her dreams would be a useful and productive step in the chatting-up process, so I told her what my father had told me. You can be anything you want to be. She smiled. I want to be a junior partner before I’m thirty, she told me.
We moved in together about three months after that; and if ever I’m to be remembered for my own indisputable theorem or law of nature, it’s this: two accountants should never occupy the same dwelling. It’s too dangerous. It leads to a catastrophic build-up of prosaicity or mundanity particles, which once it reaches a critical mass – I shall insist that the Law be named after me, but she was really the one who discovered it. Hence her ultimatum: either she’d quit the day job or move out. I begged and pleaded with her to stay. I was pathetic. I cried. I think that shocked her somewhat. She handed in her notice and started painting.
She confessed to me once, when it was too late for it to matter very much, that one of the main things she’d liked about me, when we first got together, was the fact that my father had been a Nobel laureate. She kept asking me about him, and I was too polite to tell her that I really didn’t like talking about him. She found a photo of him on the Internet (why don’t you have any photos of your parents, she often used to ask; I said that we’d moved around a lot, and things get lost in transit) and said what an interesting face he had, and didn’t notice when I didn’t reply. When she got her projector, she shone this photo on our wall, ten times life size, and set about painting him. Probably it was one of the best things she ever did, technically accomplished and (considered as a piece of art) very good indeed. While it was drying and she was out one day, it met with a freak accident. A bookshelf collapsed, and a brass carriage clock that had belonged to her grandfather flew off and tore a big jagged hole in the canvas. She believed that, which shows how little she understood about trajectories and basic ballistics.
WATCHING PAINT DRY is an underrated pastime, but eventually you’ve had enough. I rang my agent.
“Talk of the devil,” she said cheerfully.
“I’m still on holiday,” I said reflexively. I had of course called to beg her to find me some work, but there was no need to surrender my hard-won time straight away. Some concessions first, if you please.
“Tomorrow afternoon,” she went on, plainly not having heard me; a bad line, presumably. “Nice little job, something a bit different. You’ll enjoy it.”
“I’m not calling,” I told her firmly, “about work. I was thinking. About getting stabbed the other day.”
“You really don’t want to dwell on that,” she said. “You’ll make yourself paranoid. More so than you already are.”
“I am not paranoid.”
“There, you see? You take every little thing as an accusation. Now, all you’ve got to do –”
“I was thinking,” I said, slowly and loudly, “about who knew I was likely to be there. As I see it, there was you and me, the customer and whoever set up the job and contacted you. I’m assuming the customer didn’t contact you direct.”
“What? Sorry, I was miles away.”
“Did he or didn’t he?”
“I don’t know, do I? He was just a voice on the other end of the phone. Oddly enough, I don’t ask these people a lot of searching questions. I fancy they might not like it.”
“Would you recognise the voice if you heard it again?”
“I have absolutely no idea. Why?”
“I could turn back into him and call you. Then we’d know if he contacted you direct.”
“Yes, I suppose you could, but what exactly would that achieve? Listen, I know you had some sort of bad experience and it’s upset you, but there comes a point when you need to pull your socks up, get a grip and start earning some money. Now, this job I’ve lined up for you. Are you listening?”
“Or else,” I said, “you could call whoever it was you spoke to. Warn him. Some bastard tried to kill your man, that sort of thing. Really, we’ve got a duty to let them know. He might be in danger. His death could be on our conscience.”
“Oh come on,” she said wearily. “Do you really think I keep stuff like that? Customers’ numbers, that sort of thing? The moment the job’s over they go in the shredder. Client confidentiality. Data protection.”
“I don’t believe that,” I said.
Long, icy silence. “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” she said. “Because if I did hear what you just didn’t say, it could seriously damage our professional relationship. I would never ever lie to you. If that’s not absolutely understood, maybe we should call it a day.”
I felt stupid, and ashamed of myself. “Just as well I didn’t say it, then. You mentioned something about a job.”
WE GO BACK a long way, my agent and I. Of course I’ve never met her, just talked to her practically every day on the phone. Sometimes I think it’d be nice to meet up, put a face to the voice. But I can see all sorts of good, valid professional reasons why not, and she’s never suggested it, and I don’t want to offend or disturb her by mentioning it myself. So, although she’s my principal human contact and the closest thing I’ve got to a friend (not very close,
at that) I don’t know how old she is, whether she’s married or single, where she lives, anything personal. She’s got a sort of drama school voice, so I’ve got no idea where she’s originally from. I have an idea she’s fond of apples and red wine, but don’t ask me how I know that, if it’s even true; something she may have said at some point, some passing remark which I may well have misinterpreted. She knows a fair amount about late nineteenth century French music, but I know for a fact she’s never read The Wind In The Willows. Whether I like her or not is an issue I’ve never addressed, for fear of reaching a decision.
IT WAS ABOUT a week after my wife left me that – here I go again, messing up the narrative structure. My father had the same problem. Don’t think that just because he was a mathematician, he didn’t have this sort of problem. More or less the hardest part of a story to get right, he used to say, is the beginning, matched in difficulty only by the middle and the end. That was what was holding him back, he claimed, in his research. He could never figure out where to start. Every narrative, after all, whether it’s prose, epic poetry in iambic pentameters or a string of equations, has to set off from somewhere if it’s ever going to arrive.
The hell with it. It was about a week after my wife left me, and I was sitting in the room. As I recall, I went to pieces quite slowly, gradually and following a linear progression. On day one and day two I’d actually gone in to work, with the polystyrene people; I hadn’t actually grasped what had happened at that stage, and still fondly believed that a resumption of normality was possible. On day three I stayed home but called in sick. Days four, five, six and seven (and on the seventh day he created a new heaven and a new earth, one little room an everywhere) I spent mostly just sitting in the room, not even thinking. I just sort of existed, and the world around me was without form and void. I vaguely recall that for a while the telephone would ring (I sat listening to it as if it was a piece of music; a bit dull and repetitive, but still better than anything written after 1950) and then it stopped ringing, so whoever it was had given up on me, which was really just common sense.
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