by Geoff Dyer
‘You’re going to kill yourself?’
‘No.’
‘You’re going to pay me that money you borrowed four years ago?’
‘No, I’m leaving England.’
‘When?’
‘In about three weeks. I booked my ticket today.’
‘Jesus.’ I looked at the jar of marmalade and the teapot. ‘Why?’
‘There’s no point staying here.’
Then, as if offering an alternative answer, he said, ‘The fable’s got to run its course.’
003
That night the weather riots.
Dreaming that the door of the flat was being kicked down I woke to the sound of the wind hurling itself at the walls of the block. A strong wind lunged around the room, flinging the curtains aside and then sucking them back through the gap of the open window. Above the surge and shriek of the gale came the sound of breaking glass. I closed the window and looked out as another gust began thumping at the windows and walls. The air was full of dark shapes. Branches flew through the air like shrapnel. Burglar alarms were ringing in the distance. Street-lamps rocked and swayed. A section of fencing was catapulted into the road. A piece of corrugated iron floated through the air and clattered against a wall. Someone walking along the street was battered to the ground. The grass was flattened and glassy like a wave swept back into the ocean by the receding tide. Trees lunged at each other. The air was thick with leaves. From across the road there was a deep kurrump as a tree thrashed clear of the earth, hovered for a moment like a rocket on the point of take-off and then tottered and crashed to the ground. A few seconds later a clump of bricks crashed through the windscreen of a parked car. All around was the sound of the gale breaking the branches of trees and pounding the walls of buildings.
I was still staring out of the window when, suddenly, everywhere was plunged into darkness. The ringing of burglar alarms died instantly. In place of the faint rust-coloured glow that had hung over the city there was only deep night. Next day the air was fresh as a shaved face; the walls of buildings looked sore and clean as if a layer of dirt had been razored off by the wind. Uprooted trees were everywhere, scattered across the roads like barricades, vast craters where their roots had been. Here and there were piles of masonry, the debris of houses looted by the wind. A fresh breeze ran through the grass. Everywhere seemed lighter. Where before the light had filtered through clumps of trees now only bewildered daylight lay like a flood across junctions and road. The sky was an innocent blue, washed clean by the wind and rain with no sign of contrition or knowledge. These things happen sometimes – that was the only message written on the blank sheet of sky.
002
Monica and I were standing on her balcony, drinking beer and watching the setting sun carve deep canyons into the clouds. From the stereo in the living-room I caught snatches of Callas singing of love and betrayal, her voice like a promise so vast it could only be broken.
Monica went inside to get more drinks. As I turned to watch her go I found myself looking straight into her bedroom. On other occasions when we’d been on the balcony the curtains had been drawn and I’d not noticed the room behind us. This evening the curtains were wide open and the light was on. Clothes and jeans were piled on the bed. A dress was hanging on the back of a door. Odd shoes were scattered over the floor. Magazines, cassette tapes and books. On her bedside table were a full roll of pink toilet paper and an old clanger-style alarm clock. Two pillows. A stack of LPs and her old music centre. No posters on the walls. The door of her wardrobe hung open, revealing coloured dresses on hangers, the silver rectangle of a mirror. In the window was a well-tended pot plant. The window was very clean and because of the darkness of the balcony the room looked exceptionally bright. There was a stillness about the interior that made it look like one of those installations in museums showing rooms and furniture from different periods of history. It was easy to imagine a small discreetly printed placard just below the window-sill: ‘Young Woman’s Bedroom, Council Flat, South London: Late Twentieth Century’.
What will survive of us?
Monica came back on to the balcony carrying two more cans of beer and a small grass joint that gave off a thin drift of smoke. She had put on a red and blue turtleneck sweater. Over the blocks of flats in the distance, thick crimson light welled up behind the last dark rags of cloud.
001
The sun was watery and faint. The long trunks of mottled trees were scattered across the Common. A slight mist. Gangs of workers piled branches into the back of a lorry. Any trees still standing were bare and broken; high branches hung at angles that couldn’t have grown. The grass was strewn with wet brown leaves. Smoke drifted in the distance.
Steranko and I walked on until we came to a part of the Common that had been cleared and scraped flat. Large piles of wood were smouldering and burning. A lorry dumped a load of branches and then rumbled off. The soil was heavy, soft and criss-crossed with the marks of large tyres.
We followed the tracks into the bare stretch of ground where all the trees uprooted in the gale were being slowly burned. The ground here was covered in a layer of grey-white ash. With each step a small cloud of ash was kicked lightly into the air, like sand on a beach from which a tide of fire had receded. All around, piles of ashes and embers were still smouldering, some two or three feet high. Nearby, a mechanical digger scooped up thick loads of black earth, swivelled round and buried the trees’ ashes beneath a dark drizzle of falling soil.
We walked towards a fire that was burning fiercely. Expertly made, it was banked up so that the lower slopes glowed red and white hot while new wood thrown on the top burnt easily and steadily. Another lorry juddered past and deposited a load of wood. Two workers threw the wood on to a slow burning fire, their faces touched by the light of the flames. There was a rose tint to the sky. The smell of burning wood. Through the waves of heat rising from the fires, lorries and buses on the nearby road melted and rippled as they passed by. Behind them were the bare branches of tall trees and, still further off, a few lights in large Victorian buildings. To the right a long line of trees that had survived the storm receded into the distance.
Unnoticed, the sun had disappeared behind the Victorian houses. The fires burnt quietly but all around was the clatter and roar of the lorries and the digger, the traffic on the road. The light from the fires made the hazy sky a pale golden blue.
The pale light fading, the leaves burning, the trees receding.
We walked on and there, hanging in the wide gap between two rows of houses, was the sun: a perfect crimson disc, thin branches silhouetted against it like broken veins. Smoke from the fires drifted across the bare ground. Buses shimmered along the road, the blood-coloured sun suspended only a fraction above them. High above the sun a red vapour trail, razor-thin, cut the sky.
Another lorry arrived, this time dumping a load of pallets, hardboard sheets, chairs, tables and desks. Steranko asked the man driving the lorry if we could borrow a couple of chairs.
‘Help yourself,’ he said.
We dragged two large armchairs to where we could watch the sun shiver through the heat and flames of the largest fire. Flames reached high into the air, staining the sky a thick blue. The lorry trundled off and we sat back in our armchairs, surrounded by the waste ground, the slow-burning fires and the sound of the digger mechanically returning the ashes of the trees to the soil. Smoke from the fires behind encircled and drifted past us. Slumped in his armchair, long legs stretched out in front of the fire, Steranko’s face was bathed in the deep red light of the flames. More wood had been thrown on to the fires behind us and they erupted suddenly in bright flames. Two more workers from the parks department came along.
‘Are you supervising the fires?’ one of them said.
‘We’re just sitting here,’ Steranko said. The man limped off and then he and his mate began throwing the hardboard, chairs and tables on to the fire. They caught immediately and bright yellow flames reached higher into th
e air. The heat scorched our eyes and we pulled the chairs back a little way. At the base of the fire the burning mass of wood from the trees glowed and pulsed. On top, tables and chairs perched for a few moments at odd angles and were suddenly engulfed in flames. Something thrown on the fire bounced off and landed with a clatter at my feet: a record player, smouldering.
The heat was so intense now that the two men had trouble throwing stuff on to the top of the fire. Their faces were stained deep red with gold and black shadows. The sun had sunk from sight as if consumed by the bonfire. My face felt scorched, my eyes watered. I touched the arms of my chair to make sure that it was not about to burst into flames beneath me. The burning frame of a chair toppled down the slopes of the fire and rolled, still burning, to the ground. There were shadows everywhere. Steranko’s face and clothes were lit bright orange and yellow. The sky had turned a deeper blue than either of us had ever seen. Another table caught light and I moved back still further, angling my chair to the left, looking away from the flames. High up in the frozen sky was a full moon, bathing the flattened ground and the trees in calm light. Half of my face was still scorching hot from the fire, the other half chilled by the evening air. Steranko had also turned his chair round; the left side of his face was pale and silver-grey in the cold light of the moon. Burning more slowly now, blue-grey smoke from the other fires curled slowly past us. There was another whoosh of flame from the main fire and we turned away from the moon and the empty sky as a mattress went up in a gush of flame. The two workers walked over and stood watching the fire with us.
‘Hot eh?’ one of them said, wiping his smoke-blackened face with a piece of rag.
‘Throw them chairs on when you’ve finished will you?’ he said a few minutes later. We said we would and they walked off into the night. We continued sitting, watching the worsening flames subside into molten red embers. Alone in the waste ground, in our armchairs, we were reluctant to break the elemental pull of the fire.
Eventually we got up to leave. Together we swung first Steranko’s and then my chair on to the fire. For a few minutes they sat there as if untouched by the heat and then suddenly erupted in a rush of flame that flung back the cold of the night once more. We walked back through the waste ground, fires dying all around us.
It was two in the morning by the time I found the apartment. At first I thought I had been given the wrong key. It turned in the lock but the door refused to budge. For five minutes I stood on the dark landing, pulling and pushing the door, turning the key first one way and then the other. Then, suddenly and unexpectedly (some fluke of the mechanism) I heard the easy click of the key engaging the levers and the door opened. I ran my hand up and down the wall, found and flicked the light switch. Nothing happened. It was too dark to see anything. Lighting a match I entered the apartment and while the light flickered I made out a small kitchen. I lit another match and made my way into the main room. By the light of the match I could see a bed, a table, a desk, the blurred square of a window. Striking my last match I walked towards the desk and tried the lamp there. To my surprise it worked. In addition to the bed and table there were some hard chairs, a book-case and some kind of sideboard. Paperback books and clothes were scattered here and there.
The room smelt of stale time.
Back in the kitchen I noticed a cup and a plate in the sink. On the table was half a loaf of bread, solid as stone, surrounded by scattered crumbs. There were some greyish milk bottles, a towel, a small glass with silhouettes of dogs and ‘Every Dog Has His Day’ printed just beneath the rim. I turned on the hot tap and immediately the water heater humphed into life. By now my eyes were used to the dim light. There were some spots of mould at the end of the tap. Cracked tiles.
Lying by the door were a couple of Airmail letters, covered by the smudged postmark of a shoe – I must have trodden on them as I came in. I picked them up and saw immediately that the address of one was in my own handwriting. Post-marked six days ago, it had arrived too late; as I posted it his own last letter was already making its way towards me.
I went back into the main room. On the wall, attached by yellow sellotape, was a familiar, faded poster for an exhibition of an artist’s paintings. An identical poster hung in my own flat back in England.
Time had settled on everything like dust. I picked up a sweater with a shirt inside, taken off at the same time – how long ago? – and thrown carelessly on a chair. By the skirtingboard was a pair of shoes, the outside of each heel worn down almost to the sole. How much meaning was contained in the accidental arrangement of these things? How far back would you have to go to decipher the simple creases of that shirt, to establish how it came to be lying there, like that?
I walked over to the window and looked down at the wet street. Through the threads of rain I saw someone hunched up in a raincoat beneath a street-lamp. There was a brief flash of lightning and in the sudden bleaching of the rain I saw the figure in the raincoat look up at my window and then walk on. A shiver passed through me. A moment later he disappeared from sight, the echo of footsteps hanging in the damp air.
Be near me when my light is low.
Near the desk was a small electric fire with a frayed flex. I plugged it in carefully and immediately both bars began to glow orange. Arranging my coat on the back of the chair I sat down and looked at the mess of papers and odds and ends that covered the desk. There were a few cassettes, pens, an empty glass. On the back of an envelope was written FRIDAY and a neatly printed list of things to be done. All of the other papers were in his usual chaotic scrawl. I picked up odd sheets but most were incomplete. Many paragraphs had been crossed out; there seemed no discernible continuity.
One by one, I pulled open the drawers of the desk. The first was empty except for pencils, an old diary and a small dictionary. In the next there was a stack of unused paper and some more sheets covered in writing, much of it crossed out. In the last drawer there were more sheets of unused paper and, underneath them, a large notebook. I opened it in the middle and flicked through a few pages. Though much neater than any of the other pages – as if he had been copying from an earlier draft – the handwriting was still unmistakably Freddie’s. The pages were bathed in the yellow light of the reading lamp. I read a few phrases at random, flicked through some more pages and then turned back to the beginning and read the first sentence:
‘In August it rained all the time . . .’
Skipping here and there, impatient to get to the end, I read all the way through, remembering incidents that I had totally forgotten, recognising many episodes despite the distortions and dislocations. By the time I came to the end the first grey light of day was coming through the window.
The text stopped about twenty pages from the end of the notebook. I flicked through these last pages in case there were some more paragraphs but all were blank.
Reluctant to break the spell of the past, I took off my glasses, rubbed my eyes and sat back in the chair. As I did so I noticed a couple of postcards taped to the wall above the desk. To one side of these cards, propped up against the right-angle of the wall was a photograph that I recognised immediately in spite of its age. I reached for it and saw that a few words had been written on the back: ‘. . . that terrible thing which is there in every photograph: the return of the dead.’ Then I stared at the image on the other side.
We are all there on the roof, crowded together to get into the picture frame. Spreading across the ground are the thin shadows of TV aerials. Surprised by the self-timer some of us are caught at unexpected angles as we jostle for a good position in the photograph but because the light is so bright everyone is in sharp focus and is clearly recognisable. Most of us are laughing or smiling as we squint into the glare. Freddie is drinking from a red can of beer. The colours are striking: there are the reds, blues and whites of T-shirts, shorts, dresses; a half-peeled orange; a halo-yellow cycling cap; the wide stripes of a deckchair. And over all of this is the deep blue of the empty sky – the colour of memory.