With a Zero at its Heart

by Charles Lambert

  5

  He has to stop treating his home like a hotel, his mother says, and his first thought is to say that the service in hotels is better, but he holds his tongue and takes some boiled ham from the fridge. Two hours later, he’s camped on the roof of his friend’s house, in a valley between slate-clad slopes. They’ve reached the space through a propped-open skylight. They have crisps and lemonade and are prepared to stay there for the rest of their lives, or until someone comes to find them. This is our real home, they tell each other, as the daylight fades and the dark clouds gather, and they’re scared to death and would like to be in bed.

  6

  The family home is where the deepest resentments grow, subtle, relentless as moss, the furring of surfaces organic and gradual, as though life were no longer flesh and blood but bricks and mortar, a suffocation. The collective noun: a suffocation of houses or, rather, of homes. Houses are neutral. Homes are where he’s held, transformed into a wailing inmate, convinced of his innocence, but also convinced that his innocence is his guilt, if only they knew. Homes are for the mad and sick, he’ll learn, or for something known as rest. He would rather be homeless than be at rest. Meanwhile, his mother stands holding his face, waiting for a change of air, or some other healing agent, to arrive.

  7

  His father helps him carry his brand-new trunk into the room. One wall is window, a roof garden outside. The sofa slides out to become a bed, there’s a desk, two armchairs. It’s his home, and he’s waiting for them to leave him so that he can simply be there in it, and be himself. Tomorrow he’ll buy an ashtray, and mugs for coffee he’ll make for friends he doesn’t know, who may already have arrived and be waiting, as he is. His life is in this room and other rooms on the far side of the garden, new friends, first love. He barely notices his parents until they’re gone and he sits there, helpless, damp-eyed, wondering what to do.

  8

  He leaves a house in the suburbs with a view from the terrace of distant saints and moves into the centre. He has painted doors and ceilings, and a bed made of strips of unvarnished wood like a rack. Naked, he lies beneath the crystal chandelier, now dimmed by a patina of dust, his hands on his stomach. Outside the window he can hear the voices of the young men from the seminary, arguing about which one of them a favourite priest adores the most. The church in the square is called Saint Catherine, its name a corruption of the Latin word for chained. In the house of his own God, he can feel the hard bright pulse of blood.

  9

  The first house they see has no roof and a view of the mountains through a deep hole in the wall. A corner of the attic has been partitioned off to hide a lidless lavatory, elegant as a vase, plumbed into nothing. The attic floor is covered with the husks of larvae and broken tiles. The ceilings of the room below are lined in newspaper whitened with limewash and bemoaning the death of Moro. In one of the rooms an open suitcase made of cardboard contains underwear in various stages of distress. There is a tap, but no water, and a mattress leaning against a wall. They walk around the place, entranced. They make an offer. The house is theirs.

  10

  He moves back into the bedroom that has never really been his, although he has spent at least one weekend a month here for the past five years. It is his parents’ house, and then his mother’s house, and soon it will be his and his sister’s, and then it will belong to a stranger. He sleeps in the room, in the single bed, and then the beds are rearranged and he sleeps alternate nights in the double bed that was once his parents’, alternate nights in the single bed beside his mother. He lies there listening to her breathe, waiting for her to speak, or need him, or talk of love. He lies there, sometimes sleeping, always at home.

  1

  They are standing beneath a bridge to shelter from the rain. They caught the wrong train and now they are waiting for his father to pick them up and take them home. Something is wrong, but he’s not sure what. He’s too young. Years later, he will see a film in which two people stand beneath a bridge and scream and he will remember this evening, and years after that he will find himself standing beneath a bridge in a town in Portugal with a woman he is supposed to love, and although it isn’t raining he will remember this evening once again and the sense of something being wrong, and of him not knowing what to do to help.

  2

  It’s been raining for weeks, interspersed with flurries of snow. Just before Christmas, the telegram could arrive at any time. The woman who’ll bring it walks miles across fields each day, her bag on her back. She stops at each farm en route, to rest her sopping-wet feet and sip a drop of some seasonal tipple while envelopes are held above steaming kettles. Everyone’s waiting for news of someone, or something, not necessarily addressed to them. It’s a time of hope, and expectation, and indiscretion. He stands at the door, his mother beside him, waiting to hear if he’s been accepted. He’s been waiting for years, and he knows it. The postwoman hands him the telegram. You’re in, she says.

  3

  His favourite poet has told him that first love has no impossibilities, but impossibilities are all he sees. He has been waiting since the day he saw him walking across the college garden, his jeans too short, and there is nothing to be done. They have talked about Picabia, and Picabia’s palette, and drunk coffee from a series of mugs. They share a love of poetry, and of certain kinds of music. They talk about sex, but words are not enough. He prefers Gary Snyder to Frank O’Hara, which is awful news. Some day he will come through, he thinks, but through what he doesn’t know. Everyone thinks they’re a couple except them, but maybe one day this will change.

  4

  The poets take them out for dinner before the reading, the older poet picking up the bill. On the ride back from the restaurant, in the rear of the car, the younger poet’s leg is pressed against his. This can’t be happening, he thinks, pressing back, but the leg stays where it is. During the reading, he’s thinking about the party they’ll be holding later in his room. They’ve bought wine and peanuts and someone will have some grass, he hopes, already drunk from dinner and waiting. At the end of the party, the older poet wishes them both good night. In bed, he listens for the younger poet to finish in the bathroom. He has never been fucked before.

  5

  He doesn’t believe in reincarnation, but if he did he’d be waiting for death in order to be reborn. He’d be one of the three black girls, the anorexic one with her wild hair, whose voice is better than the star’s, who stands there and sings stage right, her eyes on the crowd, only some of whom will notice her. She’s always there, she will move from star to star, her weight will fluctuate, her hair will fall out and be replaced by a series of increasingly extravagant wigs. She will have a following who send her letters and teddy bears, and offers of marriage, which she’ll ignore. She will die in Paris, alone, the happiest woman in the world.

  6

  He is lying in bed, his hand in the hand of the woman on the floor beside him. Her cat is dead and she has needs he can only deflect. He should have left the country immediately after Christmas but he’s been threatened by a man with a gun and his flat is being used illicitly by football fans who can see the stadium from his kitchen balcony. He still hasn’t learned a word of the language that has purchase outside bars or restaurants. Refugees along the coast are waiting for homes to be provided, their children wrapped in knotted shawls. Everyone is singing fado and eating sausages flambés. He’s been here long enough, he says, but she’s fast asleep.

  7

  He applies for jobs in three cities, each one further south than the one before. The first city never replies, the second gets in touch after eighteen months. The third calls him down within weeks and he finds himself in a hotel room near the station, eating from a circuit of inexpensive trattorias. One day, he stumbles upon the set of a film called Nostalghia, with the accent on the ghi. He tells the technician who halts his way that he’s looking for a drinking fountain. The technician says, And I am going north, looking for the source of the chi
ll in my bones. Except that he doesn’t. Nobody reads Jack Spicer. He carries on, thirsty, patient, towards the sun.

  8

  The coffee is not very good, and may come ready sugared. He drinks it slowly, staring out to where he has left his cases, drunkenly heaped against the base of a cast iron lamppost. There are two platforms, the one he uses when he leaves and the one he’ll return to. The only way to get from one platform to the other is to cross the track. Sometimes, if he’s lucky, he’ll shoo away chickens. The train is always late, sometimes by hours, and he will be angry, but deep down he won’t care because he has already arrived, without knowing it, and no other place on his holiday will stay with him for as long as this station does.

  9

  Someday he’ll come along. In the meantime, he’s doing what all wise shoppers do, he’s sampling the goods. He’s in the world’s heart, a spit from the infant Jesus, wrapped like a wooden faggot in its votive trappings. There’s a rock that traitors were tossed off, and he’s been tossed off there as well, and a cage where a toothless lion was imprisoned at a later date and he’s flirted with the notion of bondage, but slipped away before the history of it all took hold. He’s barely had time to meet the needs of one man before another man turns up. It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it. Someday he’ll come along, the man he loves.

  10

  He is waiting at the bus stop for his new friend. His new friend is more than a friend already but he’s wary about words; he doesn’t want to upset him. He called him amante mio this morning and was scolded. Lover, he learned, is what you call the other person. All he could say was that, no, there will never be another person, because he knows this now. What he wants to say is that you are my other person, my other half, but he’s afraid he might be rebuked. They’ll talk about Plato this evening, he decides. When he sees him get off the bus, he starts to smile, they both do, and neither of them can stop.

  1

  His father would persuade him to eat his supper by making faces out of the unwanted food. Rows of peas would stand in for teeth, carrots for eyes, green vegetables – spinach or cabbage – for a mess of tangled hair. Now eat the nose, his father would say, and he would shake his head and refuse. His father was wonderful at making faces from food, so wonderful he couldn’t bear to hurt them. Later, when his father was nearing death and had no more appetite, his son spread him marmalade and camembert, as ripe as he could find, onto wholemeal bread. It’s the only thing I fancy, he’d say. Make me a face, his son would think, and let us eat.

  2

  There was orange juice that tasted boiled, in the bottles they would later use for lukewarm milk, and bananas on toast and eggs mashed up with butter and salt inside a cup for when he was ill. When he had chickenpox, his mother helped him eat them, sitting beside him on the bed, the blankets tight across his legs, holding a spoon to his mouth. On Wednesdays the house was filled with the stench of boiling tripe that none of them but his mother and his aunt would touch. When he thinks of music he thinks of tripe, and his aunt playing scales with the soft, sweet odour of it on her. The war had finished only fifteen years before.

  3

  He has a friend who eats sausages raw. He takes the paper bundle from the fridge, the paper bundle of sausages, and shakes out the chain of sausages, link by link, before lifting the last link in the chain. He takes this in his hand and squeezes the skin until the soft pink mess extrudes. He bites it off. He rolls it around in his mouth, then sticks out his tongue with the meat still on it, half-chewed, and lifts it off to sit in his palm, a wet pale egg. It’s your turn now, he says. He has blond hair, razor cut round the ears. He is flushed, excited. They stare at each other. They stare at the meat.

  4

  They are in a motorway service station, travelling home after visiting relatives who have given them barely enough to eat. Plain fare, his father says, and he sees the four of them flying through the parsimonious air, four scavenging birds. The restaurant has seating along inverted inlets, with the customers perched around the coast and the waiter passing from port to port. They sit in a row, his sister next to him, his father next to her, his mother at the other end. His mother orders something with mushrooms, but can’t eat them all. She passes one to his father, who passes it to his sister, who passes it to him. Opposite them, someone says, It’s a food chain. Humiliation.

  5

  His mother is trying to lose weight. She eats oddly flavoured Swedish biscuits. She squeezes lemons into water and, wincing, drinks it down. She weighs herself at the chemists’ and then at home, her shoes beside the scales. She makes her own clothes. She joins a club and goes to meetings, some of which make her cry. She has a special salad in the fridge, so good they all eat it and she has to make more. She says she has heavy bones. She is beautiful, to look at and to hold, and they tell her this, all of them, but none of it makes any difference. If I lost my appetite, she says, I might as well be dead.

  6

  They’re talking about food, their favourite food, the kind of thing they used to eat when they were children, or sick, or fending for themselves. He tells them about tinned spaghetti, how good it can be when you grate extra cheese into it, and no one imagines he’s never eaten any other kind, not yet, and they start to laugh, but no, no, he insists, it’s fabulous, I’ll do it for you. They’re kind, or cruel, he’ll wonder later which it was, and yes, they say, that would be great. And so he buys the cans with their yellow labels, and a lump of cheddar, and heats the gooey mass and grates the cheese. And they eat what he’s prepared.

  7

  Their first night in Milan they leave their rucksacks in the hotel, which is next to a fun fair, and begin to walk. Neither of them has a map, nor much idea of what Milan might be, but they aim away from the station towards what they imagine is the centre. It is Sunday and everywhere is closed, it’s impossible to distinguish shops from the shuttered lobbies of flats and offices. It’s a city of commerce, of power and wealth. They’re hungry, but not hungry enough to venture into one of the restaurants they see, where fur coats hang on clothes racks inside the doors, despite the autumn heat. They head back home, wound in by candyfloss, its sickly-cheap scent.

  8

  When he asks for vegetables to go with his fish, he’s offered rice or a fried egg. It’s the revolution, she explains, all the fresh food is being sold to Spain. The meat is tough and the milk chocolate-flavoured. Their friends have no money and watch them eat in even the cheapest of bars and cafés. Except for one, which serves winkles, where each has his pin. He watches the empty shells pile up. They drink green wine from carafes. The only dessert he comes across is called Molotov – spherical, vividly striped, indigestibly sweet. The national dish is a hundred versions of salted cod. He’s been hungry since the day he arrived and will be until the day he leaves.

  9

  He has already eaten by the time his friend gets home from work, but his friend has some grass and so they smoke together, and then make love, and then it is time to eat. They go to the shared kitchen in their shorts and rifle through cupboards and the farthermost reaches of the communal fridge, their bare shoulders touching in the cold blue light. He wants to make toast but there is no bread. He finds some crackers, some butter, an over-sized jar of Marmite that should have been finished five years before. You’ll love it or hate it, he says, as he spreads it on the buttered crackers, and his friend says I’ll love it. And he does.

  10

  He lives in a country where people talk about one meal while eating another and reminiscing about a third. They come back from cities whose names they can barely pronounce and people ask them how they ate. Was it good? Si mangia bene? He can’t remember the last time he felt hungry. Hunger’s the shibboleth, the marker. You’re obsessed by food and hygiene, an English friend announces one evening, because you’re one generation from dirt floors and famine, and she’s right, but not entirely right, and everyone’s upset, but continues to eat. He thinks of a scullery in his grandmother’s house,
and the pressed earth, and the bottled fruits, each labelled with its year. Such riches shored against their deaths.

  1

  They are sitting on the banks of a pool, the size of a large room, surrounded by trees. It’s winter and the branches of the trees are bare. The surface of the pool is coated by a skin of ice the thickness of a sheet of paper. There is a powdering of snow on the fields around them and the ice itself. They are daring each other to crack the ice by putting their weight on the edge of it when the air shatters over their heads into a thousand singing pieces and some object – possibly a bird, but that isn’t their first impression, their first impression is of fear – breaks through the ice to disappear in the waters beneath.

  2

  His mother is standing in the room between the kitchen and the garden where they keep their boots and outdoor clothes. They call it the scullery because of the sink in the corner, where they scrub new potatoes free of their soil. She is standing beside the table in the middle of the room, wearing rubber gloves and an apron. The mincer she uses for meat is screwed onto the table. He’s scared of it, scared that his fingers, or her fingers, will be trapped inside and turned into blood and meat. She is pushing something into the mincer, her head turned away. Watch out, he wants to say. She is crying. It’s horseradish, she tells him, through her tears.