With a Zero at its Heart

by Charles Lambert

  4

  She closes both eyes as soon as the bicycle begins to move at speed. She freewheels down the hill, the road the narrowest ribbon beneath her feet, a great rush and a darkness, a counting as far as she dares before she opens them. She is shaking with the wonder of her courage and the risk of it. Forty years later her son sits in a car at night, the lights turned off, and he is driven along a fen road, straight as a die, his eyes half-open, half-closed, by a woman whose eyes are entirely closed, and they are both laughing as hard as they can until she pulls up at the kerb and is sick into her lap.

  5

  The side door to the college is locked and it’s too late to slip through the porter’s lodge. They try to climb over an iron railing but one of them loses his footing and cuts a hand. Then they remember the underground car park with a second exit inside the college. They hurry down the piss-stained stairs and through the door. The first one’s already stumbling when someone hits the light switch and they’re standing at the edge of a moaning carpet of men in cast-off clothes and sacking, a groping carpet that struggles to its feet as they gather together and shrink in fright, the noise of men stirring into life and their own noise, echoing, bleeding into one.

  6

  He snorts coke with strangers and they are his wonderful friends until they split and he sobs alone in the middle of a street he has never knowingly understood. One friend drops a tab beneath a cliff on a beach on the island, too scared to move in case the cliff crumbles onto his head. Another friend flies from a terrace but forgets to remind the road to take him in, to hold him, his arms outstretched in excess of love. A third friend shares heroin in a stranger’s flat in a border town. It’s his only time. He is struck by jaundice, then dies. His final joke. If I’d been yellow, I’d never have known what being yellow means.

  7

  It is early morning, summer. The air smells of evergreen, some kind of laurel perhaps, leaves crushed into fragrance by backs and knees and cheeks. A cry of help comes out of a bush and he walks in to see a small man with his trousers round his ankles and a teenage boy with a knife. He wants my wallet, says the man. The boy stands there, uncertain what to do, watching as the intruder eases the knife from his hand. You don’t need this, he says. This is a place of love. He closes the knife, gives it back to the boy and walks out of the bush. The small man, in white clogs, follows him home. He’s scared.

  8

  He has sex with men whose names he doesn’t know and doesn’t ask. He’s bent over in parks and fucked by more men than one, and pushed to his knees by these and others. He carries them home on his moped, too drunk to steer. He climbs into parked cars and sucks off the driver to stay out of the sudden summer rain, hands pressing his dripping hair into the driver’s groin. He’s blown by an older man who works in a sugar factory – all that sweetness – who tells him his life is shit, the world is shit, but whose cock is as smooth, and hard, and warm as polished wood. He has never worn a condom in his life.

  9

  He has lunch with friends in his favourite restaurant. They eat seafood and drink white wine on a wooden platform raised above the beach, behind a bank of succulents with star-like flowers, the acid pastels of love hearts. Between the table and the sea, the rows of blue-and-white striped umbrellas have been taken down and furled like leaves against an unexpected wind. They order more wine and then, when the meal is over, and a final glass of grappa has been drunk, he stands up and jumps from the platform, half-walks, half-runs towards the abandoned sea, taking off his T-shirt and kicking his sandals from his feet, two waiters close behind. He falls like bright rain into the moon-swayed waves.

  10

  His home is on fire, the telephone fused into a molten lump of red and grey, the part that rings out still ringing. He stands beside the burning house, his hands in his pockets, and the air is filled with scraps of paper on which he has written his secret truths, now curling and blackened and lost even to him. The world smells of petrol and fat and the ringing of the phone is dulled by the sharp bark of a dog, his mother’s dog, stifled by smoke as it scrapes against the concrete larder floor to hide its final bone. Nowhere is safe. The ringing goes on, and the dog’s bark, and his secrets, filigreed by the cajoling flame.

  1

  The first animal in his life to die is Sandy, a retriever brought down by a barbed wire fence. He has no memory of this. What he remembers is a woman with a tweed skirt and a terrier of some sort, or possibly an untrimmed poodle, and this dog, whose breed he can’t quite place, attacking him as they stand outside a post office in the village he started school in, and his being afraid, and possibly bitten, as he has never been afraid of any dog before or since. And then he remembers swans in the park lake by the library and his mother telling him they can break a grown man’s leg with one sweep of their wing.

  2

  He’s presented with three white mice in a plywood box, divided by a wall with a zero at its heart. The smaller part has newsprint shredded for bedding, the larger an exercise wheel and canisters for food and water. The front of the box is panelled with glass. He hopes his mice will breed, holding them belly up to see what sex they are, but all he can see are pimple-like bumps. When he goes on holiday he forgets to leave food and water for them. He is too ashamed to say. Back home, heart beating, he runs to the box. Curled up in a corner, pink as marshmallow beneath the bedding, he finds a half-eaten cluster of baby mice.

  3

  His father comes home one day, carrying a dog bought from some passing stranger, who was beating it with a stick because it had misbehaved. Don’t touch it, his father says. Not yet. The dog shakes as his father places it in the armchair nearest the fire, its lips drawn back. Its name is Rascal. A crossbreed with brown eyes, it’s soon his father’s shadow. It settles, sleeps by the hearth, is loved. One day it catches a rat. Good Rascal, his father says, good boy. With other people, it backs off, darts forward to nip their bums, a nip that’s half-bite, half-suck. Its last day alive it draws bright blood from the thigh of a child with a stick.

  4

  He goes to a country grammar school with a farm attached. He watches the pink-white udders of cows being drained and hens’ necks lightly wrung. In biology lessons they’re given live frogs to take apart, one frog between two. With the end of his four-coloured biro, he prods at the grey beating heart, exposed, a sick smile on his face, the smell of ether still in the air, then wires the back legs to a battery and watches them twitch. Later, they stand round the pen where the pigs are kept and the pig-man picks up each of the piglets and slices off his testicles, the size and shape of baked beans, and the piglets squeal out their little hearts.

  5

  When they buy a cottage in the Pennines, a dog and two cats are part of the deal. The cats disappear before nightfall but Susie stays. She’s been chained her whole life in the hollowed-out carcase of a rusted car, but they’re townsfolk, they let her into the house. She skirts the walls, then curls in a corner to sleep. On heat, she disappears for days and nights together. When the litter’s born, the final pup is rose-grey, misshapen, over twice the size of the rest, a parody of a runt, the whelp of an alien god. Susie snuffles at it, anxious. She watches the man bear it off to the bucket, then turns to the other pups with relief.

  6

  He’s coming out of the Arcady, alone, when he sees the dog. It’s four o’clock, almost dawn. He can’t afford a taxi. The club’s on the outskirts of the city, and he’s tired and sad. The dog keeps its distance as he sets off, walking through areas of boarded-up warehouses, residential streets, closed shops, closed schools, closed metro stations. He notices a bar about to open for people setting up a nearby market and stands outside until the coffee machine’s turned on. The dog sidles over and presses its muzzle into his hand. You can’t come home with me, he says, stroking the dog’s head. I haven’t got any home to go to. The dog nods, understanding, and slips away.

  7

  They’re walking down the hill towards the beach when she s
ees a cat on the wall and stops to stroke it. She’s drunk; they both are. He walks on a little, watching the full moon reflected on the sea, until he hears her call. She’s standing with her hand on the cat’s back and a man beside her. She’s wearing a white top that picks up the light of the moon. Come back and rescue me, she says, and the man turns to look at him, then backs away. He walks back up the hill to where she’s standing, the man moving off against the wall. He says the cat’s his mother, she says. He nods. He must be mad.

  8

  She’s sitting in a cardboard box with the word FREE in felt tip on the flap. The last thing they need is a dog, they’ve barely unpacked, but she fits so neatly into his hand, her small legs dangling from his palm, her head the size of a small round apple, peach-furred to the touch. They decide to take her home. Apart from her belly, which is palest pink and human, she’s the colour of toffee. They call her Toffee. One ear lies flat against her head, the other refuses. They could watch her all day as she stumbles and sits on her haunches, eternally surprised, or tries to climb down the step from the kitchen. Some days, they do.

  9

  They stumble across a zoo in a park behind a mosque. It’s a sad place and the saddest place of all is the cage with the orang-utans inside. One of them has been here for fourteen years, they read on a card, and it’s a life sentence and the orang-utan in question, picking at her teeth with a slim pink-fronted finger, knows this and is asking them what she’s done to deserve it and if they can put her in touch with a clever lawyer. They walk into another room half-filled with branches. After a moment he sees the sloth, only feet away from him and looking at him with upside-down sympathy and asking him what he’s done, and why.

  10

  His mother falls ill and they hurry to be with her, leaving Toffee at home in the care of a friend. There is death all round them, parents, parents of friends; the cat they rescued from an empty terrace was buried in the cork wood only months before, wrapped in a small white towel, the claggy earth on the spade relentless as memory. Days pass, the nurse says full moons carry people off, staring meaningfully at the grey-blue light in the sky. They sit beside his mother but the next day, his mother still alive, they hear that Toffee is ill, then worse, then dead. They sit beside his mother while friends take her beautiful corpse to the cork wood.

  1

  No one remembers his first words. While his mother is expecting him she holds her mouth in a certain way, so that his mouth will be like hers, a full mouth, firm but soft, her tongue held curled within it, slowly to be shared as the two of them speak to each other in the otherwise silent house. She hates baby words, forbids them in his presence. He will never have a bow-wow or hear a moo-cow. He learns to read as soon as he can hold a book in his hands. Before that, he traces the word mother on her forearm while she reads him a bedtime story, his fingernail tickling out the letters he has conjured from air.

  2

  He loves big words, the way they snake and bend. Some words are silky smooth, like Blancmange; others are jointed, like Articulate. He learns and remembers the botanical names for red hot poker and convolvulus and is called on to repeat them to family friends, who smile and applaud. He hears, and learns, the word Precocious, like Precious with a secret at its heart. He whispers new words to himself to see how they feel in his mouth, how they sound in his ear. Some words, like Fruit and Awful, are rounder than others. Quick is quick, Slow, slow. Teasing his sister, he confuses Osculate with Copulate and causes a brief scandal in the car. His favourite word is Awkward.

  3

  He makes mistakes. His first mistake is to think that Misle is a verb, rhyming with pizzle, although he won’t know the word pizzle for many years, its past tense regular, meaning to side-track or derail. He tells his teacher he’s been misled, rhyming it with fizzled, and can’t understand why everyone laughs. His second mistake is to use the word Unyet, a word he is sure he has heard a hundred times on other people’s lips, but cannot write without his teacher underlining it in red. His third mistake is to think he can suit his words to those around him; that what marks him out can also be used to blend him in. So many mistakes, unyet. Unyet.

  4

  His first friend to die is called Tony Hand and all he can think about as they sit in the assembly hall to be told is that the name is like three parts of the body. Toe. Knee. Hand. He looks at his own hands, resting on his knees, and thinks about what it must be like to be dead. He lies in bed and names the parts of his body with new words, to protect himself and them, starting at Foot and working up to Hair. His word for Tongue is Icicle. Later that week, he attends the funeral at church. He’s cold. He can see his breath. Icicle is the wrong word, but it’s too late to change.

  5

  They wait until her parents are out before playing the game, in the drawing room. Nervous, they stumble over words, try hard not to giggle. But soon, sipping their cocktails and lighting another cigarette, the people they have chosen to be taken over by, step by step, direct their words and gestures, the path their conversation follows. They are foreign to themselves; they can barely imagine what it must be like to be children, playing games in a drawing room. The longer they use the new words the easier it is to understand that everything they have said before has been a lie. They have always known this language. There is nothing else. They fall silent, too scared to speak.

  6

  It pleases him that Spell is how the word is made but also, in the hands of the magician, how the world is changed. One letter separates Word from World and that letter is like the number one, or an ‘I’, or a shaft of light between almost closed curtains. There is an old letter called a thorn, which jags and tears at the throat as it’s uttered. Later he learns that Grammar and Glamour share the same deep root, which is further magic, and there can be neither magic without that root, nor plant. He’s lost in it like Chid in Child, or God reversed into Dog. Somewhere inside him is a colon. A sentence can last for life.

  7

  He’s buying a name tag for Tilly, his cat, in the next town up the coast. He sits in the shop while the tag’s engraved, surrounded by medals and trophies, sports cups, the names and dates of the dead. The shopkeeper asks him where he’s from. England, he says. You’re Protestant? she says. He shakes his head. I’m atheist, he says. She’s startled. You mean you don’t believe in God? she says. How can you not believe in God? He’s bored. He shrugs. She says, You must believe in something. I do, he says. I believe in this chair. I believe in death and cucumbers. I believe in my cat’s name, Jeoffry. I believe that every living thing is holy.

  8

  He dreams of waking in a foreign city in which he has lived for almost all his life and no longer speaking the language of that city. He looks at his partner beside him, in the bed they have shared for more than twenty years and there is nothing he can say, no way he can tell him what has happened. When his partner wakes and speaks, he shakes his head and the words that come out of his mouth are baby words. Baa-baa. Choo-choo. Words denied him as a child. His partner continues to speak, but nothing he says makes sense. He wakes in the bed he has dreamt of only moments before. He opens his mouth to speak.

  9

  He finds himself translating a book about the philosophy of listening, and it strikes him that what he is doing as he translates is precisely that; he is listening, as if through a wall, his ear pressed up to the text as though it were paper and plaster, and beyond the plaster some rigid lightweight but sustaining structure, possibly of wood, and beyond that a second skin of plaster and paper, and the passage inward moving outward, repeated in reversed order, a room full of people who are talking all together about listening, and about their demons, because not only Socrates had his demon, to whom he listened. Sometimes there is so much noise the book is hard to hear.

  10

  He is watching his father die in hospital. His father is explaining to him that he must call for a taxi to take him home. He gives him a piece of paper with an address that has never existed, a c
ollage of all the houses they have owned, a magical home from which he has been exiled to die. He listens to his father repeat the address time and again, and each time it is different. The final effect is kaleidoscopic. The last day of his life, still in hospital, he asks his son to fetch him something, but the word is incomprehensible and his son, faced by his father’s deafness, is reduced to miming out what it might be.

  1

  He has no first memory of money. There is no primal scene in which he reaches into a pocket, or wallet, or purse, or finds himself exchanging something of no apparent worth – mere paper and metal – for something he wants. It’s as invisible as language, it pre-dates consciousness, it is simply there. Yet his earliest memories of his parents arguing are memories of arguments based around money, his moving from house to house, from school to school; a moving spurred on by money and its absence. It’s as powerful, and invisible, and all-encompassing as God must once have seemed and yet at no point can he remember thinking, So this is what money is, this is what money can do.