You’ll pull away into the afternoon, a late Saturday afternoon, and in the sun the warmest of the week. On the way home you’ll pass through those sections of the city where the young convene, skin for placards, declaring independence. All day you’ll have had your homecoming in mind, promising yourself that you will rest and let the street grow dark before bringing in the bags, but when the homecoming comes you’ll sway so with fatigue that any rest you begin will close the day, so you’ll pack the entire load into your chest freezer immediately, following which you’ll shower. You’ll make no notes. You’ll leave that for the morning, many black hours distant. You’ll put yourself to bed. You’ll lie on your side, the smell still in your nostrils, remembering.
She rises well today, with plans. She runs. Afterwards she takes down her neglected recipe books, makes notes and sighs at the photographs. They talk like it’s so easy. She buys what she needs and cooks timidly with music on.
Steph rings. She and Greg and some friends, nice people, are going for drinks in the evening at a place that has just opened. Would Frances like to come? To celebrate? Just a small Sunday thing. The voice is soft, the phrases kindly, but it all smells of afterthought. Frances says she’s busy and feigns regret.
Dinner is roasted vegetable couscous with pomegranate jewels and a chilli and mint dressing. It was easy. Her plate clean, the counters cleared, she takes her laptop into the front room and places ads for a new housemate. She reads the internet in bed, the machine wheezing. Tomorrow she will book someone to mend the bathroom fan.
Monday morning she runs early, before the day. When the owner opens the cafe, Frances is already in position, pacing. Coffee for breakfast. For lunch a jacket potato with tuna and sweetcorn. The man does not come.
Tuesday she runs a mile more. She could have done two more miles. When she has finished her cheese sandwich, the cafe owner asks what this is really about. Frances says again that she is waiting for a man. The owner’s name is Dawn. This is announced like a secret once Dawn has folded herself into a seat at the same table. (They are her seats and her tables, after all.) Frances describes the day she cried and met the well-dressed man. Dawn says she remembers, vaguely. She doesn’t sound sure.
He has my phone number, but I don’t have his. He said he comes here a lot. Are you certain you don’t know him?
Sorry. Doesn’t sound like one of my regulars. But I’m not the best with faces.
Do you think you would recognise him if he came back?
Dawn considers this.
I might, she says. But I might not. You must be so bored in here all day! How long do you plan on sticking to it?
I’m not bored. I have my book. There’s nothing else I have to do.
The running persists in Wednesday’s rain. Back in the warm house, Frances drags the clips from her hair and leaves them in a puddle by the sink. Briefly she becomes emotional. She loves this place, right down to the air inside.
Hooking the door to the wall, Dawn greets her with a special Mor-ning that rises and falls in even halves. It means You belong in my day now, but you can’t just say that to people or you’ll frighten them. On the other hand Dawn can’t say nothing. It is unusual for someone to spend five consecutive working days waiting in a cafe, so if she does not share her feelings it suggests her feelings need to be concealed. Nice to see you again would be the easy choice, but that also makes it the most likely way to lie. Saying Morning as she did, making a weary recitation of it, like a class of schoolchildren, superficially says that Dawn is getting tired of seeing Frances every day. If this were true, however, she would hide it, so Frances knows that it is probably a joke meaning the opposite, and the irony requires Frances to imagine Dawn’s real feelings, which involves imagining her mind, a moment of actual friendly contact rather than a plain statement that their friendship exists. That’s unless Dawn is double-bluffing. Some people do hide behind self-parody. Frances has vegetable lasagne for lunch and the man does not come.
She wonders if he might be away on business. She wonders if writers go away on business, and if he really is a writer. She knows that there are literary festivals and book tours, and that there is research. He might be having a really fertile spell. He might be housebound. A frenzy of coffee and takeaways and typing and milestones toasted with good wine, all the squalid glamour of it. His desk will be a cemetery of cups, his computer a solid servant of many years to which he’ll deny being superstitiously attached like a child to his stiffening blanket. He will admit other rituals, like starting early. He dips his pen in dew. No. Delete that. Starting late. He’ll be a dark one, a typist of the night, a fierce mechanism while others sleep, and sleeping now. There’ll be long lulls grimacingly borne, maybe whole days still-handed, then the breakthrough. Ideas tear out of him like oil bursting a wellhead. There’d be no thoughts of cafes at these times.
The letter sacking her arrives Thursday. It hisses across the mat when she opens the door after her run. It’s unexpected, but only in the sense that she’s not had expectations. Work has receded in her mind that much. She reads the termination agreement several times, and in the end understands that they are offering to pay her two and a half times her annual salary to leave the company and never discuss why. A confidentiality clause of this kind is normal, but the figure is outlandish. Usually when constructively dismissing someone the tactic is to offer an insultingly low settlement, await angry rejection, then pretend to cave in by making a better offer, which is then usually snatched like victory. This offer looks desperate. Thirty months’ salary at the rate stipulated in the Employee’s contract of employment. She can’t find any ambiguity there. She checks her contract of employment and it stipulates what it should. She wonders whether the figure in the termination agreement could be a mistake. She wonders whether this is what she is supposed to wonder, whether she is meant to want to sign immediately before the mistake is found. We want this done today, is what this says to her. She signs and showers.
She watches a bald man at the table two away from her. He’s a lawyer maybe, with his papers. She watches him scribble, then a phone call brings good news. He gives a little Yes! like a child winning. You can see he’s desperate to tell somebody what has happened from the way he wriggles on the flat of his seat. He’s embarrassed but in the end he turns to her, as she knew he would.
I don’t even need this now, he says laughing, indicating his many documents.
She smiles but says nothing, curious to see if he will continue unencouraged.
It’s a patent application. Not mine, he adds quickly, almost insulted by himself. Mine’s granted. These guys were trying to rip me off.
What’s the product?
Spray-on insulation. For pipes, for baths, for walls … there’s loads of uses. Much better than the normal stuff. It’ll cut people’s U-values by thirty per cent at least. More if it’s an old house. Twelve years I’ve put into this.
The rest she doesn’t listen to. He seems to have nobody to phone.
Late on Friday Dawn asks Frances gently about her plans for the weekend. The man does have her number, remember. If he wants to, he can call.
Honestly, I don’t mind waiting, Frances says. If that’s OK with you?
It’s fine.
In fact, she has some young concerns. She’s begun remembering the man’s brusqueness at their meeting in the pub. Like maybe he was in a hurry to get away, or not good in crowds. He might have presumed things, seeing her and Patrick. The men had been tense together. He might remember her drunk.
She could always try the pub again. Dawn is right. It is the weekend. The police did not ban her from the place, and she won’t interfere. Then with the thought formed it’s just the easiest thing to let it push her there, and almost into me.
But that’s habits for you, as I’ve said before. Get too accustomed to your subject’s habits and in the end it trips you. I was tired. I had stopped expecting Frances to go anywhere but the station after a day in the cafe. My mind had wandered
. I don’t remember where. She must have been heading straight towards me for some time before I fled.
*
I’d not imagined this book as a kind of treatise but it seems to have become one, and there’s an honesty in letting it become what it wants. I am trying to be honest. Really that’s all I’m trying to be. I began because I had accumulated all these notes and they were clamouring to be heard. And keeping secrets, that makes a clamour too. Plus of course I’d been saying I was a writer for years, when asked. As a result I’ve had to talk about the practice a fair amount and imagine what it’s like. It’s not like I imagined.
They were so timid, my first attempts. Like a farmer planting seed in new land, I had a sense of how things might go with lucky weather but no confidence about my guesses. I was slow. I wanted to get it right and I agonised over everything and deleted everything. I could have written an assured paragraph of commentary on each word I chose, then a well-structured chapter about that paragraph, then a charming memoir about this crazy chapter. What do you do when there are more choices than time to choose? It worried me.
Patrick’s van was the turning point, I think. Fifteen times I passed it on the way to and from my own, a bag in each hand. I appraised the detritus on the dashboard. I imagined the boxes inside and wondered whether I should have used boxes myself, perhaps with a trolley. I became mindful of the fact that I might want to tell you about these things in the book or journal that by then I had a pretty firm intention of writing. Therefore on each pass I began gathering other observations, on the van’s condition, on its type, on its parking style. It was a tether for my restive mind. Then on perhaps the sixth or seventh pass a thought occurred to me. In order to describe this experience honestly I would now have to tell you that I’d been preoccupied at the time by trying to observe things worth describing. Instinctively I was reluctant to admit this, since it suggested that my actions, even accurately recorded, had themselves been steered by thoughts of telling you about them, and as such my life itself had become a kind of fiction. Directly afterwards, of course, I realised that I could not be completely honest unless I also told you about my dilemma about what to tell you. And about that dilemma too. I’d have to admit that this was in my mind while the blood-bellied sacks were in my hands. Henceforth merely intending to write about my experiences would cause me to live at a remove from them, I realised. Just considering myself a writer had put the rest of me on a stage where I would stay until the book was finished. This clinched the decision to complete the first page the following day. I would be rough with it, if necessary.
Since then the urge to write has grown, and recently been overwhelming. Like that farmer again, I face the harvest no longer worried about having enough but about having enough time. These nights have been rich black loam for me, for all the inconvenience involved and the discomfort lately. I’d been sleeping and writing in my van quite a bit, so last week I set up new quarters. I don’t like being at home any more. Plus I was losing a lot of time driving hither and yon when I needed to be close to Frances. The new quarters are dark and cramped, and I’m invariably tired when I arrive, but I wake my machine, and idly read yesterday’s pages, and my fingers are drawn in. Soon I’m going at it without let-up, forlornly excited, knowing I can’t get everything down, knowing how much I’m losing, determined to get all I can. I also know I’m given to expatiating, so forgive me for that. As things wind down I can feel myself being a Penelope or a Scheherazade about this story, creeping back in to spin it out, and spin it out. At the same time I am the ambitious suitors, and the bloodthirsty king.
*
Every day for hours she sat in the cafe while I watched and listened through suitable devices. Looking back at the early notes now they are so redolent of the time that it makes me hear again the claps of crockery and the swish of the coffee machine, glad yet fretful sounds. Because these were ragged days, the light hours gazing in wonder at her devotion, the nights with body parts to hide.
I had thought vaguely of a country burial, but the more I considered the plan the less I liked it. Even setting aside technique, stray rocks or roots, and how conspicuous you leave the earth, the digging would not be easy. A grave has to be more than a metre deep, more like two ideally, or else burrowing animals take an interest. That’s why you hear so much about shallow graves. You don’t hear anything about the deep. Two metres down then, and about one square. Could I dig that, then fill it, quietly and in the dark by hand? If I could it would take three nights, I estimated, between which my unfinished work would spend two daytimes on display. I could rent a remote cottage and dig in the grounds, but that would leave clear proof should investigators one day take an interest in me.
Further ideas came. I could attempt to dissolve the body in acid, though that makes fumes and needs equipment. I could buy a boat and drop it at sea, each piece weighted against the buoyancy of its decomposition gases. I could acquire land and build something with concrete foundations. They might have been good ideas, but they were no good for me. I was in strange shape, though I was working on it. Those guys they catch, you know, those guys they catch with segments in the freezer – a sign infallible of nutty murdering, it’s said – those guys were working on it too. A freezer is what you have until you have a plan. And even as Sunday and Monday passed, then other days, that Saturday stayed frozen. In truth I was reluctant to go back to the bags at all. I just wanted them gone quickly. I began to find reasons to stay away from home, in the van at first. Then I tried a hotel, but I didn’t like being seen coming and going, or having people clean my room. Nor was I keen on the paperwork of renting.
I’m not about to announce an easy answer, by the way. As far as I’m aware there isn’t one, which is why there’s such ingenuity in the literature. While researching gravedigging however, I did get to know some graveyards, and in the end my answer came from there. Graves are generally dug a few days before the funerals that need them. Time it carefully, therefore, and I might be able to dig a shallow grave in the bottom of a deep one, then let the subsequent ceremony finish things on my behalf. Privacy would not be difficult to find, not if I worked at night, when graveyards are reliably deserted by all but a few intrepid hobos. The difficult thing, it turned out, was finding graves. People don’t get buried with the regularity they used to. We’re less particular about our condition in the afterlife, and besides there isn’t space. Really the only exceptions are the wealthy and religious. Increasing the difficulty was the fact that I couldn’t exactly bring the bags along each night while I searched for a plot. If I found one I’d have to go back, empty the freezer, then return in order to begin what I guessed would amount to three hours’ digging. I could not overrun into the morning under any circumstances. In effect this restricted me to the four nearest graveyards, with time to search no more than two per night. The best turnover was at a large Muslim cemetery, but that was almost an hour’s drive. Each night therefore I toured the nearer grounds and came home defeated, for at most a couple of hours’ sleep. Sometimes I took modafinil, which is an excellent wakefulness-promoting drug used by pilots, students and narcoleptics. You’ll find it online. Even so I was tired and edgy.
Now Patrick was on the internet. Always the same photograph of him in some bar, pink from holidaying. It did the rounds beside accurate descriptions of his final days and a big MISSING. Frances was too busy to see it. Every morning she returned to the cafe, never late. Sometimes I’d nod off in my van and she’d be the first thing I saw on waking. She’d read or eat, or gaze through the window. Sometimes she wrote things down in a black notebook. I don’t know whether anything in my life has made me happier. The memory of her dedication and patience drove me on at night as I climbed wet railings, slipped down mudslopes, contemplated pits. Sometimes when the cafe was about to close I’d leave the van and find a discreet place to stand where I could watch her in the flesh.
Even so, I grew disconsolate. I’ve been persistent enough with projects in the past. I have that kin
d of character. But the repeated failure to find a grave was getting me down. Probably it was the accumulation of lost sleep or mental strain. Seeing that I could not carry on much longer, I reviewed my plan, and hit upon the idea of reading the death notices at mosques. Muslims bury their dead quickly so they make big announcements, and on Sunday afternoon, when the cafe was closed, I came across a funeral planned for Monday at the large cemetery, which I still had time to scout in daylight. I felt conspicuous among the veiled and bearded mourners at the place but they had their own worries and paid me no attention. With little effort I found the promised grave of Anwar M, a good plot, newly dug, beside a line of bushes. That night under a thin moon and full of modafinil I clambered down. There’d been rain so the ground was soft but sticky. My boots became earthen clubs. With the grave already deep, it was a serious effort to lift each shovelful clear without tipping it on myself. Once the hole deepened, it was impossible. I therefore developed a method of tipping the soil into spare refuse sacks, which by luck I had with me, and storing these up on the grass. The sacks were too heavy and loose to lift above my head, so I had to tie each one to the shaft of my shovel, climb out, then heave it upwards, before lowering myself back in. Even with my spare shovel propped up as a step, the climbing was hard. A couple of times I thought I wouldn’t manage it. The method made progress though, and I could count the bags to judge how much, which helped with morale. Even so the first hints of sun appeared while I was still down there, forcing me to remove my night goggles, which I trod into the earth. Twenty bags was my target. Three more to go. When I hauled myself out of the grave for the last time I was shaking. I dropped in all my tools along with the frozen sacks, the hard forms inside already softening at the edges. The soil went on top, giving at least a thirty-centimetre covering, I reckoned, with a small surplus that I dumped on the gravedigger’s own pile. At nearly six I trudged away, my hands raw and my back aching. I slept until eleven. On waking, I returned, and in the light drizzle watched the funeral of Anwar M from a nearby grave, feigning grief with real tears.
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