With a Zero at its Heart

by Charles Lambert

  7

  They have been smoking dope all night and someone decides to tell a horror story. He tells them the one about the face like an egg, and then the one about the man banging the boyfriend’s head on the car roof as the girl leaves the car and walks towards the lights. Each of them has a tale to tell, as though they have all been waiting for this. One friend talks about a car breaking down outside an unlit house and its driver walking from room to room, each room giving onto the next. Room after room. Door after door. It’s a story that ends in its narrator screaming for effect, which is one way of ending a story.

  8

  His partner can’t sleep for sweating. They are staying in a flat that isn’t theirs, more beautiful than they deserve; they have nowhere else to go. It is summer and they walk across town each evening, from the Ghetto to the Pantheon, and buy themselves an ice cream, which is all they can afford. They sit on a step and pray for autumn, pray that it will arrive. They have made a mistake and they will have to pay for it. Their house in London had a ghost that kept them awake all night, but they would exchange that ghost for what they have now. The wrung-out sheet, the turning. The word that neither of them is prepared to say.

  9

  The hospital windows overlook the bay, the castle to the right, a trace of snow still clinging to the southern hills, the island of Capri in the distance. There’s a terrace as well, with a table and two yellow chairs, like the ones in the room. Each side of the room has its share of beds, lined up against the walls, a bed, a chair, a bed. The bed beside the window is empty, the weekend case they’ve brought is open on the chair. He’s waiting for his partner to be brought back into the ward. They said the operation would take two hours and he’s been gone for more than four. There is no word for what he’s feeling.

  10

  For years he has no fear of age or death. He’s a child still, his parents’ child, and invulnerable. His Bullworker has been lost in some abandoned home but he’s not like Hippolytus, fighting the bull from the sea. He’s endless, infinite, a string on which all these shimmering wordy pearls are threaded like breath, like the largest lie a child can ever tell itself, that nothing can ever happen to him. That string that ties him to the world. And then, as though something of little substance has been removed, so silently he barely knows it for what it is, he finds himself with the fearful air in his hand, his parents gone, alone with the chill of it.

  1

  For the first years everything is black and white, and has a deckled edge. Each image is as small as his world, in which he is disproportionately large. He is generally the centre of attention. He looks blond, and perhaps he really is. When colours arrive they are greenly bilious or brownish, or the shades of love hearts, pastel, powdery, unreal. These colours fade before long and perhaps what he remembers now is less the colours they were than the colours they became. They are in Wales. He has a short-sleeved shirt, striped blue and black, and his mother is wearing a white dress with a repeated green motif. This is the holiday she dyes her hair purple by mistake.

  2

  To start with colour is a box of paints, round pots of primary colours that make shapes when mixed with water. The shapes are simple, houses, people, dogs, the sun with all its rays. Then the number of colours grows. They come in tubes, and small deep plastic pans and a slim metal box he can slide into his pocket. They come in the way the sky changes at night and moonlight on water, and skin beneath the sun, on card and canvas, and the mutable surface of the world. They align themselves with belief, and political conviction. They form rainbows in the sky, on flags. They are worn in lapels on a twist of ribbon, held by a pin.

  3

  As a boy his favourite colour is red. Some colours you wear as clothes, and some colours you paint your bedroom walls, but neither of these is what he means. Red is the colour that speaks to him, or that he will speak through to others. It is violence, and passion, and blood. He is wondering what it might be like to penetrate these places and the fastest way in is through red. Later, less in love with the notion of violence, aware of the effects of passion, familiar with blood, he changes his mind. His favourite colour is blue. It goes with his eyes, and with the sky. If he has to choose, he would rather fly than burn.

  4

  Eau di nil. Vermilion. Mauve. Is there a time he doesn’t know the names of colours too well, with the expertise boys are denied, or pretend to be denied, for their own good? But how can simply knowing something be bad, he wonders, and tries out the word brownish for size, and finds that it also fits. It’s a question of knowing which word to use, and when. In the meantime, the colours are there, in all their queerness and ambiguity. When each of the pupils at his school is given a strip of earth to grow things in, he doesn’t think twice. Among the lettuce and radish of the other boys, he plants a single row of gladioli bulbs.

  5

  He is lying in bed, imagining what he will do, as an adult, for revenge. He imagines a garden fête, or a wedding reception perhaps, in the garden of the people who have hurt him. They will all be there, standing in smug, self-interested groups, unaware that he’s arrived in a chauffeured car, which he will leave in front of the house, the chauffeur inside. No one will recognise him at first, as he walks across the lawn towards the first group. Then someone, a woman, will step back, startled. He will have a copy of his latest book in his hand, his name above the title. He will smile and nod. He will be wearing a canary yellow suit.

  6

  Each school he goes to has a different coloured uniform. Blue and grey, green and grey, brown and yellow, blue and white. The point of the colours is to mark them out and to make them proud, but he’s already marked out, he doesn’t know how, and doesn’t in any case feel pride. He never asked to go to school. He’ll feel pride fifteen years later, and will have his uniform then, a T-shirt and jeans, and a triangle, pink, on his chest, but right now the badges have Latin inscriptions and the colours run when it rains. The uniforms have to be bought from a special shop in the centre, which makes them all equal, except that it doesn’t.

  7

  He arranges his books by colour. All the white spines are Picador. One day, he thinks, he will be published by Picador and his book will have a white spine, so he is half right. There is the block of glossy orange Penguins with black and white lettering, and an older block of orange with white stripes through the middle. There are green ones, also with white stripes, but he isn’t so proud of those, and pale grey and white ones, which are modern classics, and blue and white Pelicans, which are books that have made him think rather than dream. And then there are all the other ones, of various colours, that don’t belong and yet demand their place.

  8

  There is a photograph of him nude on a pebbled beach near Bristol, he can’t be more than two years old, and his skin is so burned by the sun he appears as deepest grey. But no one says grey to mean sun-tanned. The more usual word, he learns as he grows, is brown. Brown as a nut. He lies half-naked in the sun without thought of the harm it might be doing, in gardens, on beaches, beside his mother, who wears gloves because brown hands are common. In Britain, he’s brown and proud. In Italy, he’s black because what the sun does in Italy is turn people black. There’s something faecal about brown, he suspects, although nobody says this.

  9

  The rooms he has lived in have been mostly white, but his strongest memory of a room from his childhood is the dining room his father built onto their house. Two sides of the room were made of glass, but the rest of the walls were painted orange-tinged red, the colour of Heinz tomato soup. An upholstered wooden bench ran round beneath the sheets of glass and he is climbing onto it, his eyes half-closed, imagining himself at the heart of a round, red fruit, or a cradling fire, the veins in his eyelids darting against the red. He remembers the heat of the room, and his father standing there, holding his arms out for the child to jump towards.

  10

  Six weeks after his mother’s death they are sitting in a friend’s car a
nd a text arrives to say that Amy Winehouse is dead, and he is taken back five summers to a flat in Paris, on the Left Bank, where they spent a month listening to ‘Back to Black’, time and time again, and there was a florist’s below the flat that belonged to a man of Italian origin, with whom his husband-to-be made friends, and so the flat was filled with roses that had only days to live, their colours both strong and subtle, and they were placed in a copper bowl and painted, time and time again, and there was – there is – no end to their beauty.

  1

  His aunt has lived in bed all his life, at the heart of a double bed she has shared with no one. He sits beside her, feeding her violet-scented cachous until she pushes his hand away, tired. He wants to hug her, and does, her bed jacket soft pink in his face, against his cheek, but one day she is smaller than he is, and he asks her how she feels for the first time. Let’s hang up my handkerchiefs to dry, she says, the way we did, and he fetches the wool and stretches a line across the bed. She reaches beneath the pillow for clean handkerchiefs and gives them to him. Peg them out for me, she says.

  2

  The day she dies he is sleeping in his bedroom. It is still morning and his mother comes into the room to wake him. She opens the curtains, then sits beside him on the bed and holds his hand in hers. While she talks he watches the aeroplanes he has made from kits and glue as they circle in the draught from the door. Inside the Airfix box, the separate parts are arranged along a central spine of plastic, the whole plane broken up and flattened out, displayed like the rat he saw run over in the road or the machine they use in hospital to measure life, a zigzag and a bottom line. And then his mother leaves him.

  3

  His uncle has the back room. There is a single bed facing the window. He runs into the room and bounces on the bed until his uncle wakes up and makes mountains from his knees for the boy to clamber over. Later, he knocks and hears his uncle cough and spit into a bucket he keeps beside the bed because the lavatory is outside the house and the stairs are steep. Much later, his uncle takes him to the pub and they drink a pint together, and smoke a cigarette. And then he is far away, and his family is falling to bits, and his uncle’s skin is as soft as it was as a boy, and he is dying.

  4

  They can see the hill from the top floor, from his aunt’s room. It is some miles away, a whale’s back of green above acres of low-cost suburban housing, with a prickle of trees along the spine. Except that, now they’re here, what looked like a single file of pines, top-tufted like the maritime pines along the consular roads out of Rome, is a series of small groves, planted in lines, leaving space for the odd memorial bench. The oldest deaths are at the centre, more recent ones spiral out like some newly-born galaxy, a swirl of marble slabs placed one against the other, each with its name and date and motto, each with its waffle-topped metal container for flowers.

  5

  His sister wipes their father’s stone clean. They haven’t brought flowers because they don’t want to think of them dying; they talked with their mother about the virtues of artificial flowers, but decided, in the end, to do without. The stone wiped clean, his sister darts off towards one of the trees, returning with a sprig of leaves. Down one side of the hill is a swathe of stones so tightly laid against one another that the impression they give is of a wide grey road, an uninterrupted sweep of paving slabs. It’s hard to see how people can visit their dead without treading on others’. Yet somehow they manage, performing a jittery dance between one stone and the next.

  6

  His favourite aunt takes him to Dudley Zoo and buys him sausages and double chips. When she comes to visit him in London, fifteen years later, she’s shaken by the behaviour of her cousin’s husband. Don’t tell anyone what he did, she says, and so, even now, he doesn’t. He keeps her secret. They smoke dope together the night of Elvis Presley’s death; she isn’t impressed. Her final room overlooks the road that leads to Lower Green, and then to Upper Green. Her whole geography is here, complete and perfect as the love he feels for her. He tells her this the week before she dies, but she is confused and may not have understood and he will never know.

  7

  How many people he has met have died without his knowing? He talks to a friend about death, how lucky he has been to have seen so little, to have lived it at second and third remove. How fortunate we are, he says, but his friend disagrees and lists them, writers, poets, artists he has known and loved. All these losses, like cut flowers. You gave me chrysanthemums once, he tells his friend, a bunch so big you could barely hold them, do you remember? Losses like rust-coloured flowers thrown into a stream, to be carried away and slowly borne down beneath the surface, their petals weighted with water as their lives are weighted. I had no idea, he says.

  8

  His closest friend from school disappears for almost forty years, and then reappears. An email response to a post he has written about a memory of sleeping in a station, of pills, and music, an era of army greatcoats and shoulder-length hair and dreams of San Francisco. A lifetime ago. His friend is now retired, remarried, a house-husband no more than thirty miles from where they both went to school. A little girl. How could all this have happened to us? they say. This time, that past. And so much more ahead of us. They plan to meet. You know where this is going, don’t you? Even though they didn’t. His oldest friend, the first of them all to die.

  9

  On the other side of the cemetery, as they leave for home, are the graves of children, like a special garden set aside for their amusement. The gravestones are decorated as if for a party, with massive paper flowers and dolls that come up to his waist and rain-sodden teddy bears tied on with garden wire. The impression they make is poignant, but also creepy, as though the bereaved one’s attempt to recall the innocence, the playfulness, of the child has been subverted into schlock. We are so bad at mourning, he thinks, so clumsy and wordless, but this isn’t what he means. He wonders what it must be like to have lost a child and be orphaned in reverse.

  10

  He’s thinking about what a good age might mean, how duplicitous and evasive the term becomes when applied to people he loves, his mother, his father. A good age is when people you don’t know – movie stars, politicians – die. A good age is when you have had enough, but to have had enough is to have slipped past goodness into something darker, the after-ness of good. The coming down. The little death. How clever that seemed when he was young and everyone was still alive, to talk of post-coital tristesse. That sadness that gave the pleasure depth. Ripeness is all. I’m not quite ready yet. All age is good, he thinks, so long as you are here to grieve it.

  1

  His first sense is smell. The smell of apples in an attic. But also sight, because what he can see in the darkness of his head is a floor, uneven, the russet and gold of apples, the whole floor covered with fruit. And then there is touch, as he places his shoe on the edge of this living, scented carpet and feels it move away and then give, with a crunch, beneath his weight. And so hearing is the fourth sense to be woken. He bends down and picks up the ruined apple, its glistening flesh, the bright black of the seeds against the white. He no longer wants to taste it. The fifth sense, he thinks, must be guilt.

  2

  Home is the place he is never alone in, not even in his own room, at night, with the light turned off. Home is the busyness of the kitchen, where what’s left in the mixing bowl is his, and the oven can burn his hand. Home is the bathroom, where he’s not supposed to lock the door, and his mother sings while she bathes him, and his father shaves in his vest, while he sits on the edge of the bath to watch and wonder. Home is the sofa he’s lifted off, fast asleep, only to wake up later in his own bed, in his pyjamas, with the man made of clothes on the chair to make sure he’s safe.

  3

  His father is a builder of houses, and a man of quantity. There’s a plaque beside the door that says so, with letters and the word Surveyor beside it, which makes him seem to his son like a native scout in a cowboy
film, a scout on a piebald horse. But his desk is covered with paper ruled into columns and he works all day and sometimes night to fill them. All the waste paper in the house has columns on its back, columns with numbers and his father’s exquisite, illegible copperplate handwriting. So this is how houses are built, the boy thinks, marvelling at the substance of it all, not bricks and mortar at all, but words and numbers.

  4

  His first home, his second home, his third home. He learns very soon about homes, how they’re places that come and go, that shrink and grow to suit some scale, some hidden measure, he can’t quite grasp. Sometimes he shares a bedroom with his sister, sometimes he has a room to himself. There are gardens with orchards and greenhouses and lawns, and gardens without, and pantries with marble slabs and pantries beneath the stairs. At one point, fridges enter their lives, and stay. Some houses are more home than others, like some clothes are his and others are handed-down, and never really fit. They belong to someone else, who doesn’t like him, and wishes he’d take them off and leave.