All the Rage

by A. L. Kennedy

  And if Emily had called his phone again, Pauline never said so.

  Well, she wouldn’t.

  There was nothing left.

  And he hadn’t wanted one wife and he’d never wanted two. Only love – he’d wanted love, needed love, would have died for love. But Emily hadn’t wanted that.

  She wanted me, but not my love – that was the wisest opinion to cultivate.

  So I went back to my presentable London postcode, loft extension, male Polish au pair with a marine-biology degree. And Pauline bought me a new phone – not pink – and she checks the numbers on it now and then, the way she checks my diary, and she calls the office and checks me. Her new career is keeping tabs on me and I can have no women and no girls and I can’t flirt at social gatherings and everyone knows I was caught and maybe most of the details, I don’t enquire, and everyone knows I am finished and done with, because they can see it, and I ought to be okay with this because I deserve it, but I am not and I ought to find satisfaction in the fact that I’m so blatantly chained and watched, because it marks me as a man who was prodigious and is a public demonstration of my prior capacities, but I’m not okay.

  I’m not happy.

  Mark smiled at Pauline, kept it insincere, because she suspects him when he seems to have a meaning.

  But I do sometimes, not for terribly long, a breath, a large instant, believe that I am being hurt for Emily, suffering and being punished for Emily and that she would want it.

  It makes us close.

  Pauline had cleansed his address book, wiped dozens of numbers.

  But I know Emily’s number by heart. I gave it to her.

  The air sealed itself as the train receded, burned by and left them like a spasm of rage.

  One day I will call her.

  I will.

  Hello.

  This is me, this nothing.

  Hello.

  Hello.

  Hello.

  Takes You Home

  HE WOULD HAVE preferred it if anyone else had been dealing with this, coping with this. This was the kind of stuff you dealt with and coped with when somebody died – somebody other than yourself. That was Mike’s opinion, although he had no one to hear it unless he started blurting out to strangers, which wouldn’t aid his case in most directions so he kept schtum.

  I haud my wisht. I haud it tight.

  He’d noticed these playground colours of speech nudging back in at him lately.

  Like as if I was still wee, then I’d be fine. Because I’d no be worried. I widnae fash.

  Mike didn’t quite know how to view this new interior development. He supposed it was vaguely reassuring, allowing in the ghost of his previous voice, a cosy accompaniment to his lists of tasks outstanding and general frets. But equally, the implications were all a bit sodding desperate if he really did want to be a boy again and helpless, because no one was going to take care of him at this point. No one was equipped.

  And anyway a child couldn’t manage a serious worry, a child would be destroyed. That’s the reality on which to focus, probably.

  Or not. Maybe not.

  He stared out at how mean-looking his spare room was: grubby and with scrapes to the paintwork and dirty lines left on the walls since he’d taken down the pictures. It gave the impression he’d lived in a slovenly manner. The whole situation rendered more dismal by the yellowish frown of an eco-friendly bulb.

  Bloody things are never that keen about turning on – have to ease themselves into the effort over a period of hours. They’re the elderly aunts of the lighting world.

  He’d packed up the lampshades already.

  Few things sadder than a shadeless lamp.

  Unless it’s an unattended wean.

  Which I am not and shouldn’t imagine that I am – it’ll make me depressed.

  Still, though.

  I can’t deny that folk take care of weans. They wouldn’t leave a child in cruel rooms, or jaggy circumstances.

  He swiped up at the bulb, caught it with his fingertips and set it to swing and splash shadows against each wall.

  This proving I’m a big wean.

  Walks in as John Wayne, crawls out as a big wean.

  That’s how they used to put it. In the youthful circles I was warned not to frequent, because then I’d learn how to speak in a style that was Not Nice.

  Mum imagined the wind would change, or something, and I’d be stuck sounding inappropriate forever. Didn’t want me showing the household up as Common in her Nice Street. So I couldn’t say I was a wean, although I was a wean, unless I was away off with other weans and had no Nice adults around who’d get affronted and step in to adjust me. She didn’t appreciate that I could vary: I could sometimes be a wean and sometimes a child who lived in the west of Scotland and yet maintained an aspirational accent at some social cost.

  Truthfully, I didn’t vary well – I never could sound flawlessly Nice in Nice settings, because it felt like lying, and meanwhile and elsewhere the taint of Niceness had crept in about me nonetheless and leaked through to bugger up my sentences when I was trying to relax in Less Nice company.

  What did me in was the family relocating east. To the Nice Side of the Country, I was assured.

  I shifted with them, Mum and Dad – what else would I do? I was eleven then and not exactly free-standing.

  But I never quite got round to picking up an eastern accent. I didn’t even try.

  I never respoke a wean into a bairn.

  I settled for sounding foreign – or up myself and smug, as I was often assured – and didn’t bother much with friends. I buckled under and scrambled up the aspirational ladder. I pleased my mum. I think I pleased my dad. I think I didn’t care if I pleased me, although I shouldn’t complain – the ladder’s barely there, these days.

  But I didn’t love it. The constant demands for further climbing gave me vertigo. And all it amounted to finally was earning my very own cubicle and keyboard and being left to find the joy in expressing others through the medium of maths. Then I got an office and more of the same. I sat in my office and oversaw needs and people and how they might best be described. I did not meet the people. I did not necessarily meet the needs. My job was to be the kindness of strangers. Or not. I varied.

  Another reason for keeping quiet, hauding the wisht.

  Which I am, by now, good at. I haud it with both hands and squeeze until it gets no air and I am silence.

  Although he did currently want to make a remark, perhaps in the hearing of someone sympathetic.

  I would say – if the opportunity presented, which it doesn’t – that I am being compelled to put my affairs in order, which has a bad sound. It’s not aspirational.

  He’d have added a comment or two on the way life had been for the last few weeks, or months.

  It’s been a year.

  Maybe he was noble, to some degree, for putting up with it. He’d considered this, but dismissed the idea because he’d seen better behaviour in other contexts and courage was only real, anyway, when someone else was watching. Then it occurred to him the truly noble act nobly with no one there to see and this meant perhaps he qualified, because he was unseen. Perhaps he was slightly admirable. The only certain thing was that he felt nauseous most days and as if he mustn’t slow, or stop moving until exhaustion dropped him, because otherwise he knew he’d have to cry.

  I do persevere, you can’t fault me on that account.

  And I have gone to my place of residence and am putting my affairs in order. Which used to be a sign of ill omen in the kind of British films they no longer make, ones that showed chaps in suits, or chaps in uniforms, or – at a pinch – chaps who wore suits for Sundays and were working-class and ill-kempt otherwise, but also Nice. Everyone had noticeable consonants. And in would come the dreadful news from the doctor who’d wear a waistcoat with his suit and side-whiskers, or else the shock would spring from a letter revealing some fatal disgrace. Or one of the chaps – in his uniform, or suit, or Nice Sunda
y Best of appropriate period – would clip out deftly structured phrases, explaining to some other chap that he was in trouble, insolubly so.

  Next would be a show of dignity: compressed working-class dignity, repressed middle-class dignity, suppressed upper-class dignity, and then came the ordering.

  Dear chap, I will have to go now and order my affairs.

  Mike was unclear about what the phrase properly meant, beyond the imminent removal of the chap from his affairs and the looming end of comforts and contentments of every type for solely awful reasons. It also seemed to imply that a real man should leave substantial effects behind him: a catalogue of family mementoes, letters bound with ribbon and medals from appalling wars, an orderly trove of stored wounds. It ought to be taxing to order his things, because a man should produce a legacy, at the very least of secrets honourably kept and kind regards.

  I’ve none of that.

  Or, ideally, a man was a man of substance and had an estate with dependent cottages, fishing rights, a manor with a slew of ballrooms, livestock and portfolios, diamonds, the newer of the Bentleys he’d leave to the wife.

  I’m not leaving anything to the wife.

  Mike was, in fact, simply leaving. He was letting his withdrawal run its course, combing through every material proof of himself and either abandoning it, or tamping and taping it down into cardboard containers. He had – and this wasn’t startling – proved to be of unimpressive substance. There were also too many items he couldn’t stand the sight of, as it turned out, so he was chucking most of them.

  I might have kept more if I’d got hold of tea chests for storage. I remember them as being reassuring.

  When I was a kid, Mum and Dad still had a few up in the loft from when they’d finally arrived at Windsor Gardens, their Nice Street in the east. Their pinnacle of Niceness. Neither of them ever had to pack up and move on after that. They abandoned their responsibilities in the traditional order – him first and then her – and each of them was carried out, boxed and beyond caring, by Nice Undertakers. Then the house was cleared.

  By me.

  Nicely.

  So I’ve done this before and should have been spared.

  Or at least if I’d searched out tea chests to keep me company for this bit – proper wooden boxes that smelled of exotic places and quality cuppas – then I’d have been happier, I think. I’d have believed I was surviving.

  Mike remembered the chests as having interesting labels and stencilled marks and strips of thick metal foil protecting their edges. When he played with them, he had to be careful the foil didn’t cut his fingers.

  I wasn’t careful. Naturally.

  Blood everywhere. Naturally.

  So deep it didn’t hurt. Two stitches at the hospital on the last occasion and then lectures about the appropriate levels of caution to maintain if I was to manage myself as an adult operation.

  Crying into my mother’s cardigan until she stopped scolding.

  I never intended to grow up and have to be adult.

  But I did. Naturally.

  Although I’ve heard it said on several occasions that I simply got taller and faked the rest.

  I’ve heard that said with affection.

  Around Mike were rafts and walls built out of bland cardboard. His removers had supplied the containers: nothing about what they brought him suggesting terraced hillsides under extravagant heats and skies. And nothing involving effort on his part. This was how grown-ups handled things.

  Tediously.

  He wasn’t taking to it.

  But I’m getting through. Like a sterling individual, a fine chap.

  Or rather, he wasn’t. He was spending increasing periods trying to be some other person, further off. There was a fairly constant pressure inside his flat which combined the stresses of heavy lifting with those of unearthing familiar objects and their more or less savage echoes, with noticing cracks in the plaster and the eradication, in some way he couldn’t fathom, of his hope. Becoming other than himself had relieved this and allowed him, more or less, to prepare his home for sale and then himself for his removal. He was, if not a kind stranger, then competent.

  I am getting through.

  I am doing so as another man who looks and sounds impostorish, but is better than me, and that is okay. I’ve rarely cared how I look and always sounded like an impostor, so none of this matters. It’s minor details. I’m a minor detail here.

  Sometimes, mostly at night, traces of his personality, spasms and fears, rub between his brain and the interior curve of his skull. This was how he visualised the process. And he was almost convinced that the bones which protected his thinking, which allowed it a moist and warm security, were being worn away exactly and precisely by that thinking.

  I mourn the passing of my thoughts.

  And, whoever I am, this has been frankly a right pain in the arse and everywhere else.

  No one to care except me, but even so.

  Throughout his autumn he had stayed in most evenings. This wasn’t unusual for him, but seemed an imposition when enforced. He’d been waiting for viewers to come and see his flat – as advertised with a fair degree of honesty in the customary ways. Mike had decided his home should be set beyond his reach and lived in without him, or his ornaments, or his dust.

  He hadn’t warmed to the prospective purchasers. For one thing, they knew they were in a buyers’ market and could therefore act like jaded princelings and empresses.

  They were a pack of weirdies.

  They said that my windows were peculiar, in the wrong place, an unfortunate shape, needed cleaning, were painted a gloss white that wasn’t quite gloss or white enough.

  They would plod up the stairs as if I had put every tread in their way to be trying. How else did they want to reach the fourth floor? With a bosun’s chair, on a pack mule, hauled aloft by servants of their retinue . . .?

  And then they would tell me, ‘It’s dark.’

  Course it was dark; they only ever came after sunset and that’s when it tends to get dark and why we have candles and torches and eco-friendly light bulbs and it’s why we buy table lamps in the shape of nude women with tensed bodies and long 1930s’ hips.

  I’ve wanted one of them for years, since I was barely beyond a wean.

  The setting of the sun is why we bothered to have the Industrial Revolution: we wanted to keep out the badness of the night.

  We don’t like badness. We can’t stand the way it is worse than being blinded, how it paces and howls with fears.

  He clapped his hands for no particular reason, beyond a need to hear something in his rooms. The CD player and, indeed, the CDs and old cassettes and saved vinyl and every part of his music had been jettisoned. This seemed a better idea every day: since his belongings had retreated into huddles, the whole place sounded peculiar and would have screwed up his tunes if he’d let them loose in it.

  Once a tune’s gone bad you can’t save it.

  This way the whole place hauds its whisht. I have my reasons.

  He scuffed through to the kitchen. His inadequate kitchen, apparently.

  The viewers wanted it up-to-date. But why would I bother with that? What if they found my blatantly new kitchen was also repellent? Then it would be more convincingly wrong than the knackered one that’s here, and which only quietly asks to be replaced and will shrug when it’s knocked to pieces and hauled away and not take it personally one bit.

  Likewise with the bathroom – they all despised it.

  But it isn’t poky. It has never been found poky by those whose judgement I respect. Two people can manage well in that bathroom simultaneously. Three or four could be accommodated, but who would want that, who would need that? No one.

  He’d had to agree there was an issue with the shower curtain.

  Can’t avoid seeming infectious, an unknown shower curtain. You stand and draw it across, close across, and you worry about the marks on it and what they might imply and, should it be spotless, you still freak
out when it brushes you, possibly where it has brushed other bodies before. It has memories of contact which disturb.

  But if I’d taken it down, then the bath would have looked too naked and as if I shower without protection and am odd and have exposed my joists and floorboards to hazardous levels of damp.

  Someone didn’t like the boiler. A man with stained ear-hair and ugly glasses looked at it askance.

  I looked at him askance.

  It’s a new boiler. Newish. It is serviced. On its left-hand side is a printed sticker recording maintenance dates and showing signatures to prove that all has been repeatedly well, or mended and tended until it was well.

  The sticker is almost full of tinily noted visits by trained personnel, mostly in the scribbly writing of the young engineer who’s usually sent by the servicing company and who also checks the gas fire.

  He once found a pigeon, dead at the back of the fire. I hadn’t heard it being trapped or dying, but there it was. Unfortunate. I liked to think it had pegged out quickly. Birds can die of simple horror, they’re frail that way. I had to bring in a pan and brush and washing-up gloves and hand them over before the guy would make a start on removing the little body, the maggots. He appeared likely to spew, although he held himself back, which was good of him.

  I could have tidied up myself – both the pigeon and, for that matter, any spew. I’m not squeamish, but I didn’t volunteer. Why pay a dog to visit and then piss on the carpet yourself?

  Which isn’t a good way to put it, is coarse and inaccurate, but then I am. Lately, this person who I am is boorish.

  The servicing guy has changed, too. Each time, he gets thicker in his neck and face. As if he’s maturing outwards in rings, as a tree would.

  One viewer had a problem with the gas fire, too – didn’t fancy its general attitude and demeanour.

  Mike wondered if it had an atmosphere of doom about it, a sense that blowflies might ease their way horribly out from the dark behind it and have to be murdered each morning.

  That happened for a while. Three or four flies in the living room each dawn, banging at the windows to get out and find further meat.