So I Am Glad

by A. L. Kennedy

  There is something about sudden things that can make them seem impossible. As if there were nothing in nature that happened suddenly, arbitrarily, without being in any way noticeably just. But in spite of my thinking, or my incomprehension, he had gone. I checked in his bedroom—he’d taken all his pens.

  Stupidly, I ran out and up to the park, as if being back there could loop up the flow in time. Perhaps I would surprise its mechanism somehow and simply start out there from where I’d left off with Savinien standing in the grass.

  I was only a day late, not even that. Leather-black leaves skidded under my feet on the slope and I was only a day late. If I had paid attention more to how he was I would have seen the signs of his departure and turned it aside.

  The chilled air ached in my throat while my breath steamed around me and I turned slowly, seeing nothing but an empty park, still with cold. I walked and turned and walked and I was a day late and he was gone and I leaned under one of the trees and then walked again and then stood and waited and then went home.

  For the whole of that day, my mind would open and close against the one idea that I had become alone. This meant that for several days it was quite hard to concentrate and I began to dislike sleeping. Night and morning, those soft edges in and out of the day, would open me up. Consciousness would drop its guard and pain would dig in, like the black little mole it is. On some days I felt I was nothing but tunnel inside.

  Good for a shaking experience or two, though, isn’t it—life? I think it means no harm, it’s just too big not to be brutal from time to time. And this was where it taught me what happens when I come across someone indivisible from myself. Or when a trick of personalities encourages conjunctions I should not risk. When I meet someone who needs no acceptance, because they are already home. They are not a change, but an expansion, like the flavour of a kiss, where one mouth finds another and presses into somewhere not new but warm and familiar and much more than before.

  I learned about being alone. There was more of me to be alone with now. It hurt.

  DON’T WORRY. He comes back.

  Although, naturally, I didn’t know that at the time.

  “Jennifer?”

  “Mm?”

  “What’s up?”

  Arthur was wearing his best solicitous face. I couldn’t be sure how long he’d been looking at me, my mind having been elsewhere.

  “Up?”

  “Or down. What’s the matter? If you want to talk about it. I mean, I know we only share a house, there’s no need for us to get all family about things.”

  “You and Liz will never be anything like family, believe me.” He gave a tiny flinch and I realised he must be offended. “I mean, you’re far too pleasant. I like you.” I’d never thought about it, but that wasn’t a lie. Liz was so seldom there she couldn’t cause offence and Arthur was a nice man—the kind of nice and still quite young man who was probably already thoroughly tired of being called nice and reliable and helpful and someone you could talk to in a crisis, but perhaps not at any other time because then you wouldn’t notice him.

  “Do you want to talk?”

  There, you see, he said that the way a good doctor might— interested and genuine, but aware that he’s said it a thousand times before. He may even be overacting very slightly because he finds himself unconvincing through simple force of repetition. Something about his sentences droops.

  “It’s not compulsory, but I am here. Good listener. My mum always said that. I wish I hadn’t listened when she did.”

  “You do fine, Art. Honestly. Hhhrrmm. Sorry, catarrh. Hhuhuff. Yes, it’s nice you’re here.”

  That genuinely surprised him—I would have thought he knew how useful he was, but then again, people are generally quite unappreciative of themselves. I know I am.

  “The thing is, you see, this is the problem—there isn’t really anything to talk about. Oh, I’m fed up, yes, I’m certainly fed up, but the time’ll go on and then I won’t be. That’s how it works, isn’t it.”

  “Mm hm. Where is he now?”

  I thought about asking who he meant but there was no point, so I got straight to the lie. “Right now he’s probably all tucked up in bed, being looked after like an orchid and getting paid for it.”

  “Tell me how he managed it and I’ll join him. Separate beds, naturally.”

  “It’s one of these new medical places.” I’d seen it in the cinema and taken note of the details for later use. “You go off and they give you doses of new drugs. Experiment. In the photos it looks like a big supermarket—out in a science park—they give you food and lodging and fifteen quid a week. I think he said fifteen.” It doesn’t do to get stories too perfect—the truth never sounds that neat. “Something like that.”

  “He be there long?”

  “I’m not sure. He might be going on somewhere else afterwards. He was a bit vague. You know how he is.”

  “Yes.”

  “He said thanks for all your help, by the way.”

  “Oh. I didn’t do anything. I gave him some stale Danish pastries once. He made a big fuss about them.”

  “I didn’t know you did Danish pastries.”

  “Oh yes, we bake anything—as long as it’s flat. Management policy. I try to see it as a challenge. Pastries are flat. I lent him a razor, actually, now I think. He didn’t happen to leave it around . . .”

  “No. I don’t think so. It might be in Pete’s room. Take a look.”

  I already had.

  “I already have.”

  “Ah well, sorry.”

  “Och, it was only an old one. Listen...” Arthur walked over to the window and blinked out at the dying garden. It was raining. A wet, bitter winter was blowing in. When November came, we would have early snow for the first time in years. It would surprise us. Lingering vegetation would burn black with frost overnight and I would think of how Savinien was managing, if he was safe inside, keeping dry. There was no way of knowing. I felt I might have prepared him better, told him we have a sly climate, unforgiving.

  And that wasn’t just the mood I was in, making me think on the black side, that winter no one was having too much fun.

  As Arthur fidgeted with the curtains, it occurred to me he must be well on his way to saying something difficult and I could either let him or change the subject, perhaps leave the room.

  “Listen, Jennifer . . . who was he?”

  Having been powerless to take a decision I found I could no longer go.

  “Who . . .”

  “Martin. Who was he? Did you know him?”

  “Know him. No. No I did not. I didn’t then and there is now no reason for me to know him. I didn’t know him. You make it sound as if he’s my fault.” I also had no reason to be angry, but there I was, being it anyway. Poor old Arthur, I made him jump. “All right, yes, I knew he wasn’t Martin, that was our mutual mistake, but who else he was . . . I don’t know, he said he didn’t know. Well, he said . . . I don’t know anything about him, Arthur. He shouldn’t . . . I don’t know where he’s gone. Or why. It’s a mess.”

  “Oh.”

  “How did you know? Or when did you know? You didn’t say anything.”

  “Peter sent a letter from London, just before he left—he said Martin couldn’t take the room and we should find someone else.”

  It’s funny, I’d never thought Arthur capable of having secrets until then. He looked me carefully in the eye and then away again.

  “Well, we did, didn’t we? We got a different Martin. I liked him, he really was, well he was enjoyable to have around.”

  He stopped himself from becoming any more like a farewell oration and sat down alongside me. “Probably he’ll . . . well, you never know. Shall we keep the room, we could for a bit, leave it free, anyway . . . anyway.”

  “Well, I’m not in the mood for thinking clearly about it just now, Arthur. Or anything else. I’m not having a clear time at all. Sorry. I was irresponsible, wasn’t I? With this.”

  �
�No more than I was.”

  “It felt right, though.”

  “Yes, didn’t it. When you’re in the mood, we’ll talk to Liz. Tell her something. There’s no need to do anything now. We’ll keep it between us, eh? Less fuss that way.”

  He smiled, very successfully drawing a kind of comfort into his eyes.

  I leaned over towards him. “Give us a feel at your skull, then.” Arthur’s brush cut is just long enough to separate him from anything fascist or even slightly threatening and I have the impression that total strangers quite frequently come up and rub him for luck, never mind those of us who know him. His scalp has a thick, slightly teddy bear quality.

  “Och, all right.” He dropped his head and I ruffled through the warm, clipped hair.

  “Ta.”

  “Anything to be of service.”

  “You’re a mug, you know that.”

  “Aye, but I’m happy with it. Except that’s enough, now—I’ll end up bald.”

  “Bald and happy.”

  “No. Just bald.”

  You can push even a teddy bear too far.

  Writing from my position today, the next winter weeks and months seem to be only the time I had to pass until Savinien reappeared, but then, I was almost certain that I wouldn’t see him again and so I occupied myself in adjusting to my new condition. The pain, fresh every morning, delivered right inside your door. And I did what most people try to when their lives take an uninhabited turn and they rattle about their days feeling something lost. I worked.

  When I wasn’t buried in the station, I worried out voice-over jobs in the little studios round the city, helping ginger up the listening world for Christmas’s unchristian expense. Rain would brawl up the streets, lamps would be lit and then extinguished and I would exchange one gently beige suite of rooms for another in soothing lilac or Italian washed-out blue.

  Pints of hurried filter coffee, left to distil all day on evil little hot-plates, began to give me a new reason for sleeplessness and I stayed awake, thinking only of striking the ideal tone, of adding or losing that second or two requested and of the essential musicality to fake and make. My breathing was clear and round and utterly invisible. I stood or sat, all attention, in dead telephone box cabins and gave just whoever was asking more than they could possibly pay for in obvious joy, infectious glee and solder-tight trustworthiness. I promise you, I ran up and down the octaves like a rat in a greasy drain, I turned accents by minutes within the degree until they were more themselves than they had any right to be. If you want an overriding obsession then the attainment of absolute vocal perfection isn’t a bad one to pick. It will keep you busy.

  The voice was standing up for it, too. No one had any complaints, not even me. Well, no technical gripes, anyway; what unsettled me were the silences.

  Obviously it is in everyone’s interest to keep the studios clean and free from extraneous sound. Very often I felt an enormous relief when all the doors were closed and even the low voices—the funeral parlour hum those concerned with sound can often produce—when even that was gone. But then I would be alone with the down-to-the-bone picked air, shut in a sound vacuum and suddenly under pressure to mumble and shuffle and hum to myself, anything to fill the gap and know that time was passing because I could hear it go.

  While we recorded, each word would emerge with nothing but itself, a courageous little assembly of sibilants, fricatives, plosives—lips and teeth and tips of tongues. When I work I listen hard, inside and out, and all I could hear was loneliness, slipping and smoking under every phrase, one great lack of the noise of any other living thing. I would stare through the coloured haze of my reflection in the booth glass and feel like an astronaut peering down over the edge of forever. When I closed my eyes, nowhere unfurled around me in a thick and silent arc.

  Of course somewhere in that arc, out in the dark of my imagination, there was Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac and sometimes I thought of him safe and sometimes I thought of him in danger and sometimes I didn’t think at all but he was there, like a difference in the quality of light. He wouldn’t go away. This suggested to me that excessive work would not, in itself, solve my problem. In fact, it was causing a few.

  “Is that you out again?”

  “Yes, Art.”

  He laid his hand on my shoulder, half jokingly. “Come home, your friends miss you—the old hound dog don’t do nothing but howl all night. Isn’t that right, Liz?”

  “Mm. It’s starting to feel like a hotel round here. Yes, all right, I know, I always like to use this as a hotel—”

  “But you’d prefer it if no one else did. Well, I’m sorry, it’s just a busy time of year.”

  “No need to get stroppy.”

  “She’s over-tired, not stroppy.”

  “No, she’s stroppy.”

  “Don’t talk about me as if I wasn’t here.”

  “Why not, it’s what we’re used to.”

  I needed another option. So I began to spend even more time down at the station, drifting around its pea-green cafeteria and reading abandoned newspapers. I was not unaware that the most absorbing activity next to work is usually sex. I was not unaware I had found this to be the case at other times. This was a possibility to consider.

  “You must have developed some new habits.”

  Steven.

  Steven—exactly the same size as life and absolutely bang on cue. I’ll swear some people have radar, they only appear when you’re liable to do something you’ll regret and it’s liable to be with them.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The amount you must be earning at the moment could pay for some serious eccentricities. Then again, you’re working so hard, would you have time for them?”

  “Well, that’s my business, isn’t it?”

  “Oh yes, that’s all yours. All yours.”

  Thirty: Forty, new balls please. I kept to my table and he flounced off to his, all was well.

  That is to say, no, not really—the damage was done and nothing was well. Believe it or not, that was the first time we’d really talked about anything other than work since the terminal collapse of what I might loosely have termed our relationship. Those were our first unchaperoned innuendoes and had involved us in glimpses of a certain willingness in each other’s faces, a less than hidden inclination to try something more. For old times’ sake. The first moves had been made and it was now too late.

  Either one of us could, with very little loss of honour, have decided to take no further action, but frankly this was unlikely. Or rather, it was an option I did not wish to consider. I wanted to be seriously distracted and, to be honest, Steve had a nice bum. I watched him walking away with his nasty, police-issue cup of nastier coffee and I could not help being aware of the niceness of his bum. It seemed, if anything, a little firmer than when I had known it. The whole effect of his retreating rear made me remember the muscular tucks close in above each hip bone which had been at their most pleasant when he sat, slightly tense and nude in a hard chair, as requested.

  A few days beyond that point, I polished off an achingly well-pronounced bulletin in which a prominent parliamentarian calmly explained that widescale public misery was unavoidable, given his party’s emotional attachment to ever-decreasing income tax. Finally, public spending would disappear completely up their ever-decreasing arses, but they could not bear to be anxious while it did.

  I longed to add a suggestion that wholesale aversion therapy might solve the problem more sanely than humouring the policies of the financially retentive. A whole electorate cannot nod and smile and back away for ever. I said nothing, however, and only thought wicked thoughts inside—it’s sometimes a kind of relief to write them down here, they may not be useful but at least they’re getting out more, seeing the world.

  Steve was watching my delivery from the box. He smiled and his eyes shouted, “I knew you couldn’t last without more of me— we have a Special Relationship, you and I. Go on, admit it, you’re less of a person wh
en I’m not there. Claim the major prize and lose the game.”

  I claimed the major prize.

  And even while we made our arrangements I knew it was all a huge mistake, but even a huge mistake would keep my mind busy. It might even be more diverting than something nice.

  I would have loved to tell Steve that particular truth—“By the way, I’m really hoping you’re the blowtorch for my zeppelin—my unrefundable ticket for the Marie Celeste—the flea on my plague rat—the open manhole I can fall for, so to speak. No offence.” But wiping the smirk off his face so soon might have been counterproductive.

  In the end I had three hours to kill before I went over to a flat he’d acquired since I’d known him. He didn’t have to share with anyone. Lucky Steve. Sexually active Steve. Three hours began to feel exactly long enough to go off the whole idea. For no reason I was aware of, I decided to walk the minutes away, all 180 of them.

  It was a frosty night, the sky high and sharp, pavements sheening over with a dangerous gleam. I climbed to the fat, pedestrianfriendlied street that leads into the heart of the city and found the benches. I hadn’t known until then I was looking for them. Looking for him, for Savinien.

  My adopted city is, like many others, breeding Streetpeople. They have always been here—made a different colour from other people, a different shape, with faces that are not like other people’s faces. Disinterested pedestrians have always glanced at them from time to time and known in their secret hearts that Streetpeople can never have been young, at school, indoors, in love. That they were only misfortune’s experiment in self-expression: more a kind of uneven poetry than a kind of humanity.

  Now my city, like many others, has made its moves to take what was a kind of embarrassing hobby much more seriously. We have Streetpeople who are undeniably young, very vulnerably insane, clean, sad, sober, ostentatiously human and even talkative. They are now impossible to ignore and, on some days, it seems they must inevitably become self-propagating, a whole, sealed world of Street. It is likely this world will be angry and demonstrably ungrateful towards its creators.