So I Am Glad

by A. L. Kennedy

  I realise just at that moment that I envy him his voice. I know a little about voices and his is very well placed: it has a round, open, dark tone which I like—an almost edible sound.

  “Sit down, Martin. Relax. I know I’m not too relaxed myself, but that’s just me. If you want to talk about something, talk. I can listen. I don’t suppose I’ll do much more than that. I’m pretty useless; if it’s a woman thing, relationships, or money, I’m a bit of a disaster. But, I mean, I’m not trying to put you off. Martin? Martin?”

  He is still standing, but now with his arms folded very high on his chest, hands tucked out of sight, head pulled down and forward. I can hear him making noises that I don’t understand and little moves. The dark shape that his hair makes is shaking.

  “Martin?”

  Now it sounds as though someone is beating the air out of him with a stick. I have no idea what to do or why I would do it. Martin bumps his way to a chair, lets himself drop and fold into it. When he speaks he still does not raise his head and the words escape downwards in odd bursts.

  “Please do not feel . . . I am so glad you are here . . . and so sorry . . . I am not sure, but I have the impression this is unlike me. I am not sure.”

  I’m on to him by this point. He’s crying and it has nothing to do with me. Safe. But also not safe because a peculiar thing is happening. I will find it difficult to describe, even having thought about it.

  He lifts his head and the peculiar thing gets worse.

  “Eh. I think this is passing. I think so. I do apologise.”

  He rubs his face in both hands—I presume to make it dry. When he has finished, he looks up at me before noticing his hands and their condition.

  “Ah. Does this make you afraid?”

  “It might do.”

  “Because I can assure you, it terrifies me.”

  And he laughs, making the peculiar thing even more peculiar again.

  A little advice here. If you find what I tell you now rather difficult to believe, please treat it as fiction. I won’t be offended.

  “This is one of the things I expressly wanted to ask you about.”

  “No, don’t get up, just stay there. Stay where you are and I’ll stay here and that will make me feel comfortable about this.”

  “I am not any danger, I can assure you. I’ve tried.”

  The kitchen is really quite gloomy by this time and it should be difficult to see Martin, but in fact he is far more visible than he has any right to be. When he opens his mouth for any length of time there is a pale gleam which reminds me insanely of the light from a self-sealing envelope if you peel it apart in the dark. An unnatural, static blue flash. His hands and face are simply burning.

  That’s exactly what it looks like. But with a silver burning, a chemical flame, fluctuating in and out of colour, running like mercury and then disappearing into air. When he moves, shadows boil away from him, they roll under furniture, hiding from his hands.

  “Does it hurt? Can I . . .”

  “No, there is nothing to be done. It eventually will fade. Except my mouth—that, at night when it is visible, that stays. This doesn’t happen to you.”

  “No.”

  “To no one of your acquaintance.”

  “No. This doesn’t happen. This is a thing which does not take place. Tell me how you do it.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “How you do it. I can see it’s to do with moisture—tears, saliva. What is it, a powder?”

  “Ah, I think you misunderstand.”

  “Because I can do a good thing with the striking surfaces for safety matches—you burn them and there’s an oil left that smokes when you rub it. I learned that when I was a kid—from the Quaker Oats Book of Magic Tricks. Not as impressive as you, but it’s all right.”

  Martin was scrubbing at himself with his sleeves, partly extinguishing his face and leaving a soft, failing glimmer on his sweater.

  “Jennifer, please, I’ve no wish to be alone with this. I need you to understand that I don’t know why it is happening. I don’t know if I am always this way, if something has changed me. I don’t remember. The fire, the shine, whatever you would choose to call it—that isn’t at all important. What I have to tell you which is the most important thing is that I can’t remember. Do you see? Please sit down. I’m sure this is not contagious.”

  “Why are you sure? If you don’t remember?”

  “Please.”

  “All right, all right. Why not.”

  “Bless you, thank you. Thank you.”

  He snatches up one of my hands as I come within reach and squashes it between his with a little burst of orange light.

  “Oh, I am sorry. I didn’t hurt you. Just made a surprise.”

  There is an odd sheen on one of my palms, but no apparent damage.

  “Don’t do it again, though, hmm? I think I’ve had enough surprises for tonight.”

  “Yes, yes, I can well imagine. I might take this opportunity to compliment you on your courage.”

  “That’s all right, I’m what you might call calm by nature. Being afraid would make a change, believe me.”

  “As you wish.”

  “But I’m going to turn the light on, because there’s no way I can concentrate with you looking like that—even if you have started to fade.”

  “Yes, when it dries, there’s no light. Haouh, well, you see—oh, thank you, that’s very bright isn’t it?” He kneads his eyebrows for a moment. “Now I am under a stronger illumination, I’ve gone. See?” He waves a hand experimentally. “A candle in the day. Unimpressive.”

  “More normal, anyway. Would you like to tell me what you’ve forgotten?”

  “You may not like to know.”

  “Catch me now, while I’m confused, you may not get another chance. I mean, come on, nothing you say could be any stranger than your performance so far. Or if it could I’m sure you’ll correct me. Anyway. Go on.”

  Martin closes his eyes and presses the knuckles of one hand to his lips. I can hear his breath. Then he looks at me and jerks out a smile that tightens into something slightly grim. “I am glad you are here. We didn’t meet before?”

  “I think I would remember if we had.”

  “Then chance is on my side, because I do think I need you to be here. This is what I would call a chain of incidence—a small something that makes sense when life . . . well, I have never known what life meant. I’m sure that has been consistently the truth. The truth now is that I do not care in any point whether you are calm, or courageous, or unfeeling, or—and I beg your pardon—simply incapable of understanding your position. I will take it that you are brave, so that I can be brave also.”

  “Hhrrrhf. I’m sure you can be brave all by yourself. Please tell me what you have to.”

  So he does.

  “If I begin with a very familiar beginning. Here, I take an apple from your bowl (if you will excuse me) and now we have a woman and a man and a piece of fruit with biblical dimensions which is a good way to start. To let you know . . . really what I mean . . . do you see this? . . . I can bite this. Hnn? Mmhm. Mn. So. I can understand that. This is not a very pleasant apple, but it does taste a little of apple, it has a colour which is the colour of an apple, tension in its skin and wax and shine and then sweetness and a very familiar flesh, although we can agree it is of a mediocre flavour. I remember about an apple. Good. I remember (as I said) vegetables and a variety of things, for example the sky and the grass in your little garden out there. I can remember how one should call to a cat in order to make it come.”

  He works at the collar of his shirt and then licks his lips.

  “Now, please be aware that you are coming to this in reverse, you already know the last and very much the least singular thing about me, so put that from your mind and I will lead you to the main point of my discovery which is very simply that I can remember almost nothing else.”

  His hands are beginning to quarter and layer the air ahead of
him.

  “Do you want to know the earliest thing of which I have any recollection? I can tell you that. I was asleep and knew that I was sleeping, I felt myself do it and was certain I would never wake. It was like a death without dying, Jennifer. There was a darkness cold and patient as the moon, without sound and without meaning and nothing more but my tiny thought of myself adrift along eternity. I was the black of an eye, a cold, dry look pressed in against night, and I saw only the absence of God—a faraway disinterested ache, a faint taste of intellect on the edge of time.

  “Even to remember it makes me numb—here—in my fingers, there’s still a little blindness. When I am alone now, upstairs, do you know, I don’t like to sleep. I lie on the bed and I am afraid I will go to that place again and not come back. I am like a child with more than a child’s fear of the dark. It watches me and is hungry. I believe this was not always the case.”

  He cups a hand over his forehead and rubs down. His voice suddenly smaller.

  “This is making me sweat. That shines, too, in case you wondered. All of my . . . more fluid parts, in actuality, do seem to . . . Eh, but this is not even important, because it is not explanatory. So let me think . . . how long was I in this other world? I have not an idea. The whole condition of my being there made it seem to be for ever. For ever and an oversight, a moment too small for the warmth of attention to ever find it.

  “And apart from all this, it was so tedious. Everything which was there (which was nothing and more nothing) was eternal. Do you understand? Fields and fields of nothing eternally. Dull. I believe Hell must be very like that. I believe I must have been there, in Hell, and without ever knowing why.”

  He pauses, pursing his lips at something I cannot see.

  “But very evidently my situation did change because now I am here and not there.

  “So I’ll tell you how I am released from, at the very least, Purgatory. I begin to feel warm. No brimstone, no burning, just warm. There is a little point of heat in the palm of my hand (right hand) and this passes into the core of my arm and—hopla—is at my heart. At the time this did not in one point please me. I recall that I wanted to be more dead rather than more alive and there I was becoming sensible against my will. You may imagine, I was, apart from anything else, extremely annoyed.”

  He peers forward across the table like a very large bird, or a cat, muzzling at the emptiness between our faces. I can see a kind of shatter in his eyes, flaws of light in the blue and a mineral shine. Nothing unnatural, but quite striking. And his eyelashes are over-long.

  “I am drifting, annoyed and lost, somewhere in the mind of an amnesiac Creator, or worse. Not an ideal position for anyone, but particularly not for me. I am, after all, very fond of me and care what happens to myself. But the changes are not over. I am aware of turning and rising, there is a rush of passing beside my ears and through my hair, what there is of my hair. I have never—I know this—had any difficulty with falling hair or becoming bald, I simply have too little of too coarse a type, in too desperate a distribution. None the less, I can hear and feel that I am in the process of plunging up and into a variety of morning. (At least I have the impression of morning.) There is the beginning of light and my whole skin is tickling with I don’t know what, but it’s something very pleasant, and I have a feeling of being not so terribly solitary as before. What is truly extraordinary at this point is that I landed. I came to a halt—boff—as if I had hit my head on a ceiling, except that the ceiling was a floor.

  “So I am in a house which was never there before and which is spinning to fit around me so the bed where I am lying is slipping in beneath me and the walls to the side and everything is aiming for where it should be. Then it is there. Arrived. Now I can open my eyes and look at so many different things together it is quite painful. Upwards and downwards and to every side, there are things I can see.

  “I found that very impressive and surprising for a considerable time.

  “Softly, I know that I am somewhere, rather than nowhere. I know that I am lying in sheets, that I am cold but not uncomfortably so and that I am a human being, rather than perhaps an animal, half an orange, someone else’s good idea. Then I begin to fall unpreventably asleep and I am without fear because this is perfect—all I want to do is rest. I have not been at rest for ever (as far as I can recall) so I am somewhat tired. What next? Eh? Night falls in my mind.”

  He pats his palms together with a huge grin.

  “Do you think I might have a cup of your coffee as a kind of intermission? It’s very nice, that coffee.”

  “You remember coffee now, then?”

  “Not particularly, no. I think I had something a little bit like it once, but it was more . . . more dusty.”

  “A pleasant surprise for you, then.”

  “I’m trying to look on most things in that way, yes.”

  I get up to make the coffee. “I’ll be mother.”

  I don’t feel that women should necessarily make men hot drinks whenever they are mentioned, but it so happens that I am thirsty, too. And I’ve already tasted the way Martin makes coffee. And it’s a nice little exercise for me—probably as close to being anybody’s mother as I’ll get.

  “Don’t mind me clattering about, I’ll still be listening.”

  “Thank you. I have the impression I have always enjoyed talking. I like the way it feels.”

  “Oh good.”

  “Yes, and I didn’t intend it, but this all binds in very well. Do you know the first thing I heard, safely landed and flat on my bed? The first proper thing, when my world was struck new and so remarkable?”

  “No, I don’t know. How would I know? You take lots of sugar, don’t you?”

  “I wouldn’t say it was a lot of sugar. I would say it was just enough.”

  “I’ll bring you the bag.”

  “But what did I hear?”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t even guess. What did you hear?”

  “You. I heard you.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “It was you—you were talking about something. I could hear you through the floor. You must have been about where you are now. I lay up there listening and you sounded happy and you laughed. So there you are. That really would make you my mother, eh? The first woman I hear.”

  “No. No, I don’t think it would. Let me get this clear. The first thing you can remember is being upstairs in your room and hearing noises down here. There’s nothing before that?”

  “Nothing. I explained. This is the house I fell into. This is all I know.”

  Which is the most normal introduction I can give him. I did consider avoiding a few of the stranger details until later, but that didn’t seem possible. After all, I’m trying to give you as much of the truth as I can and part of any truth will be the order in which it arrives. One fact will trigger one feeling, while another will not, whole dominoing rows of moles can romp off in entirely the wrong direction simply because of a distortion or omission in time. Far be it for me to mislead your moles.

  For instance, you should now know the kitchen I described was in that square, grey house I mentioned—one I shared with the three other people whose names were Liz, Arthur and Pete. In case you were wondering. Martin arrived at a time when Pete’s room was empty, but a temporary lodger for it was imminently expected. It may be alarming, or disappointing, or just plain unconvincing that a major figure in this whole affair was a shorter than average man who glowed—more or less—in the dark, could only remember items of greengrocery, and came to himself in a conveniently unoccupied room. It’s not what I would have chosen myself, but I had no opportunity to choose. And because Martin was a friend of mine, I would ask you to be patient with him. I wasn’t the only one with no choice. He didn’t even get to pick his name.

  “What do you mean, you’re not called Martin?”

  “I mean what that would customarily mean. If anyone called me Martin, it was you.”

  “Now you’re confusing me again.”<
br />
  “There’s no confusion. I eventually felt safe enough to leave the bed. My surroundings seemed unfamiliar but not unlikely, if you understand me. I thought I should find out whose the voice was. First I walked to the window and found that I was on the first floor of a house—you see I didn’t want to discover that this was a voice from, perhaps, under the ground. You can imagine, I didn’t wish to be surprised again in one morning. Enough is enough.

  “Now I had a problem. No . . . when I landed, I was not supplied with any clothing. Naturally, I didn’t wish to introduce myself quite so personally and a search of the room provided an assembly of garments which I could guess might be suitable. I dressed as best I could and opened the door. To my huge relief, there was indeed the rest of a house beyond it and a flight of stairs. I walked out, a little as if I were trusting my weight to the sea, but all was well.

  “The next door I opened was this one here, for the kitchen, and you were sitting at the table, reading aloud. And I am certain you can think what you said, if you really try. I am the one with the bad memory, after all.”

  “You must be Martin.”

  “Exactly. You told me that I must be Martin.”

  “That wasn’t an order, it was an assumption. We were expecting someone called Martin to take Peter’s room.”

  “I know that now. But you can appreciate that I was quite happy to agree with any kind of likely proposition that morning. Even a name. In fact, I hoped you might know me, have heard of me. I also had an idea that this must be the house where the newly arrived were given their names and instructions before they set out on their lives.” He gave me a large shrug. “Well, I wasn’t to know. You can’t deny, it is always useful to have a name, even if not one’s own.”

  “You wouldn’t happen to remember your real name now?”

  “No. Sorry.”

  “Just a thought.”

  I HATE SECRETS. No, that’s a lie, and here I was hoping to tell you the truth. Start again.

  I hate to be on the blind side of a secret. That’s more like it. Sometimes I’ll be shown, let in on, something that seems a real secret to me, I’ll be allowed to stand right up against it and look all I like, but I still won’t understand. I might as well be staring at a length of algebra, an unknown language—it will have no meaning for me. Worse than that, I will know that it must have a meaning for somebody else. So I’m stupid. No one needs to hide this from me, it is, quite simply, beyond me. I am on the blind side.