So I Am Glad

by A. L. Kennedy

  Of course, in the end we slept, we could not pull ourselves free. I can recall that I wished he might be there with me, if we were to share in identical dreams. I think half the fear of it came from the fact we saw what we saw and went where we went completely alone.

  So my mind lifted me away from his close arms, our knees tucked in together, and left me standing on ashy clay above the slope of a little town. Across the valley a windmill turned on a wooded hill. The air shivered and baked, reduced to the flows and whorls of liquid. I clung to the fear of falling while my thinking drove and spun down between narrow roofs, past a dark house, over a garden and a small, squat church and biting the air up again into white nowhere. The white bled into blue and sunlit treetops; the corner of an ugly terracotta-coloured wall.

  There was no point in speaking about it when we woke. Both of us still felt the shock of snapping back into our bones, the feverish chill of our journey.

  July had just opened with thin, hot rain when Savinien shuffled into the kitchen and told me what I’d guessed he would.

  “I know where it is.” He pushed a handful of tiny weeds into the bin and rinsed the wet earth from his hands. “I know where it is.”

  “That’s good. Isn’t it?”

  “Please excuse this, but I must ask—”

  “What?”

  He turned, leaned over the sink again and ran the tap. When I pushed back my chair to come near him he waved me away. “No.” The water ran, clean and hard, and I waited. He cupped his hands under the flow and then doused his face.

  “I’m still here.”

  “Oh, I know this. I am,” he stopped the water and tried a smile for me, “simply wasting time until I say what I must.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “I do hope so. You see, I have now to go and meet my dream.”

  I didn’t want to be angry with him, but I was. “Well. If you have to.” He had survived everything and now he was being crushed by his imagination. Or my imagination. I just didn’t want him to go. I had a cold, sliding feeling. I didn’t want him to go.

  But make an effort, look at his face and see how you are hurting him already when he is not well and you don’t even understand what’s going on. Look at him. He wanted something from you which you did not give. Get it right. Tell him.

  “I’m sorry, I’m afraid. I don’t know what to do.”

  “To do—what to do is to not leave me.”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “Here you did, your heart did.”

  “But you’re leaving me, what am I supposed to—”

  “Come with me. I can’t go there without you. I would not.”

  “I wouldn’t want you to. God, I’m an idiot. I don’t say what I mean—I can’t, I never have—I don’t feel right. Whatever wiring I’m supposed to have, it doesn’t work, or it isn’t there. Sometimes, I want to be somebody else. You make me want to be somebody else.”

  “Will you come with me?”

  “Yes, I couldn’t not. Yes. Yes. You see, I don’t say the right things.”

  “You say them. You say them at peculiar times and in the wrong order and in odd ways, but you say them. I like this. You’re always a surprise.”

  “I’m the best I’ve got.”

  “Yes. The best I’ve got also.”

  “Tell me where we have to go.”

  “Home.”

  FLIGHT, it’s a curious thing. In fatter days I shuttled almost weekly between Glasgow and London to voice-over ads for a Caledonian brand of fizzy tap water. At a pinch I could sound just their kind of Caledonian. Damp and carbonated, too—that is, I suppose, what they wanted.

  Whatever they were after, I must have delivered because for quite a while I strapped myself obediently aboard to ride the hour or so’s hoop between cities. These trips were consistently very slightly outside my imagination, our optimum heights and speed, little more than surreal, but I could not deny that I climbed aboard in one place and set down firmly in another.

  “When I was a kid we had wonderful clouds at home. In the autumn I would watch at the top of the bus coming home from school and they made a whole other country. It was like this, but from below—wide bays and open plains and mountains—everything clean and still and better than going home. You know?”

  Because I wanted to make it all good for him, I asked if, as far as London, he would want to fly. Not the direct route, but if he wanted to fly at all, it would have to be then. He was so happy I had to kiss him, happy like a boy. I bought him a children’s book on aircraft, because I had no real idea of how they worked or what to tell him. The night before we left we read his book together and were too excited to do anything much more than doze.

  The morning we left the house I had never seen him look so well. He said goodbye to Liz and Arthur, kissing them both, and then walked out to the street beside his garden without a glance back. I followed him. He was in better form than ever and going home, going to fly.

  “This is closer to God than a church.”

  “I try not to think that way, but I do. I tend to wonder if He gets us up here so it won’t take Him so long to call us back.”

  “And you have done this how many times?”

  “I can’t remember.”

  “Ha.” He gripped my hand and squeezed it; I noticed both were sweating slightly. “You cannot remember how many times. Dear Lord, this is proof of Creation. This is not a sketch at the edge of man’s vision, a piece of scenery. This is detail, this is a craftsman working though we never see it, for nothing but the joy of making. Dear Lord.”

  He stared out of his window for the duration of the flight, even when they doled us out our invalid’s portions of moulded food and moulded knives and forks. Between mouthfuls he told me how he had looked up as a boy and imagined riding in high galleons of cloud, perhaps sounding my bays, naming the plains and the mountains I’d never reached. We flipped over the journey’s back and into our descent while my sinuses stung and thumped. I think this was my least nervous flight, because I was being unnervous for him.

  As we cut in towards London the sky outperformed our thinking and became like nothing but itself. Towers of boiling white stood off impossibly from our wings, motionless, feathering into nothing, opening on to searing canyons, closing in a glacier of silence, air and light. It was just the kind of show I might have asked for—an exercise in awe.

  Savinien talked, in fact yelled, his way across the city as we rattled underground to South Kensington and Victoria. Above us, the piping-hot sun blazed through our depleted high-altitude ozone to cook up low-altitude ozone and other photochemical delights. Children, the invalid and elderly were warned to keep indoors and, I suppose, to avoid breathing wherever possible. My final broadcasting day before coming away had included segueing in a hopeless plea for better public transport and fewer motor vehicles from a hesitant environmentalist with little or no breath control. Maybe she was asthmatic.

  The coach part of the journey passed off quite easily. We were, of course, too hot and slightly delayed, but we made it. All we had to do was get on and off one hovercraft and we would be in France. That was all I had to get right.

  There are ways of getting round this I have heard of or read about and we’re all Europeans now so it shouldn’t be an issue, but it is—you need a passport to leave the country and Savinien didn’t have one. I wish I could say that I worked out a way to get round this which would have held water under any circumstance, but I didn’t. I had three things to rely on and I hoped to make the best of them.

  My own passport was in order.

  I had stolen another in-order passport from Arthur in whose name I had bought Savinien’s ticket. This put Arthur, although he didn’t know it, at great risk which was why I thought it best he shouldn’t know it.

  The last point in my favour was that I live in an intensely arrogant and racist island. Those leaving are scrutinised far less than those unfortunate foreign souls arriving on our blessed shores, those who
have white skins may be almost ignored while this is not at all the case with those who do not, and those who have British passports of the old, blue variety are generally regarded as the happiest, whitest, most innocent voyagers on earth.

  That was all. I was hoping and wishing and praying that passport examination would be as cursory as I’d found it at ports before. Dear God, say I hadn’t imagined that sometimes a glance at the outside of the document was enough, or a flick at the first page. If they reached the photograph we didn’t have a chance.

  I watched as he pressed forward with the bulk of the passengers. We reasoned a little rush of custom could do no harm. He did well, didn’t seem nervous or out of place, only lonely and much shorter than the cloud of families around him. I had no plan for what I might say if it all went wrong. Nothing to do if they took him away.

  He kept his head quite high, at the angle which would most foreshorten his profile. I wondered how much of a lifetime of comments and stares it took before a man knew how to do that so perfectly.

  Smile.

  Ticket.

  Boarding pass.

  Passport outside.

  Passport inside.

  One tiny glimmer of a further page. They have the same hair-cut, similar shapes of face.

  Smile.

  Yes, God. Yes, God. Yes, God. Yes. I will do anything you want, give up anything you want, I don’t mind, I love you and the baby Jesus, too.

  The hovercraft bounced horribly between swarms of permanent rainbows and we didn’t give a fuck. The train from Calais was two hours late and we didn’t give a fuck. I enjoyed—eventually—the novelty of a clean and spacious railway carriage and Savinien— mainly, he breathed. He inhaled and exhaled France, looked up through French air, held his arms out in French sunshine and listened and listened and listened to French birdsong, footfalls, words. When we stepped out of the Gare du Nord into the dusty, musky scent of Paris and a hot evening pavement, he dropped his borrowed holdall and embraced me.

  “Thank you.”

  “It’s going to be different, maybe disappointing. Three hundred years.”

  “But it tastes the same. And I can hear, I can really hear. I had not the smallest idea I was so deaf. Now I have the beginning of hearing—yes, it has changed, yes, it is strange, but already these are so close to the words my heart would use. I am arrived home. Thank you.”

  Pedestrians bumped gently round us as he gripped me by the shoulders and tried not to shout. “I do thank you. God, I do.”

  “There’s no need, it was your idea.”

  “But how could I have forgotten so much of myself ? How could I have done that, do you suppose? I had no knowledge that I should be here.”

  “You have had a rather eventful few months. Maybe that’s what the dream was for. Do you feel better, though? Really?”

  “Do I appear cured?”

  “You appear practically luminous with being cured. But how do you feel?”

  “New. Like an infant is new. I feel—with no disrespect to your own country—as if I have come into Paradise.”

  Several vélo engines brayed past in an entirely unangelic din. “Well, it does make a nice change. I think almost anything would. It’s good to get out for a while.”

  “Bringing me here, you have given me what I could not know, but always felt the lack of. I had a space in my mind, or my soul perhaps, which is no longer the case. If I hadn’t met you . . . Eh, but this is good. So good it hurts in my bones.”

  “Well, take it easy. We’ve got days to be enthusiastic and we’re not all the way there, yet—still the hotel to find. Do you think you could tell a cab driver where we’re going? I’m relying on you, you know—you’re the nearest to a local I’ve got.”

  “In this case I am, I believe, the oldest living Parisien possible and I welcome you to my city. Absolutely. Absolutely. Where do we find this driver?”

  I was happy that he was happy, naturally. Rocking in a purple-fur-upholstered cab, while Savinien yelled delightedly at the elderly Algerian driver, I could only be glad. I presume that if I had discovered he could play the piano miraculously well, or sculpt, I should have felt much the same. Another part of him was opened now, so there must be all the more for me.

  Except that I was discovering he talked in French—odd French, but French. He was French, more than anything else. Already he was speaking and thinking and hearing in melodies and sentences I could not understand. I wondered if I would become someone foreign to him. Clearly a few hours in France had proved more therapeutic than anything I could do and who knew what would happen next.

  The cabbie swung us along insanely beautiful prospects and the sun lowered to burst against a variety of high golden statues and Savinien asked questions and questions and questions and squeezed my hand and pointed and shouted and really did rub his eyes in disbelief and I realised that I was jealous. I was experiencing a highly spontaneous and actually rather extensive spasm of thorough jealousy, directed against an entire nation, its language and its past. If it hadn’t been so painful, I would have laughed.

  NO HOLIDAY SNAPS, I promise. Not too many, anyway. I did keep a diary, because it seemed important that I should, but I will try not to quote from it here. Many of the entries would be nonsensical to any reader other than myself. I think what I most want to say is that when I open that little book now, I remember my life failing into an easy, humid pace under a curiously merciful sun. With Savinien, I walked in a double city, listening to the past shimmer under the present and now and again blink through. I think at this time most of all, we were both very close to the sheer miracle of Savinien’s existence.

  To use a simple example, I stood one morning, watching the light clear over the river beyond what is today called the Square René-Viviani behind the church of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre. Two men were clipping the lavender bushes and unleashing their scent in clouds all around us while pigeons wandered and women washed fruit under the fountain. To my left was Savinien, hands comfortably in his pockets and face raised to the sun, one huge smile. To my right was a tree, a Robinier, named for and planted by the botanist Robin—a thick almost petrified stump, slumped over wooden supports and fortified with concrete. The Robinier was planted in 1601, eighteen years before Savinien was born.

  Eighteen. We thought about that while water scattered over the lawns, soaking into the light, making form and shadow in the air.

  Some days we would touch each other very often, making sure we were still there, firmly in our own skins. Savinien also developed a habit of sidling into the composition of any potential photograph. He was already familiar with the theory of cameras and film and had developed another theory of his own.

  “Look, what are you doing?”

  “Moy? Eh. I am working in the service of history and art.”

  “Toi. You’re sidling about.”

  “No, no. They wish to make a picture of this building which is a hideous construction and is named in honour of a bourgeois oaf who was most certainly conceived by the hindmost passage because as a man he was no more than a piece of ordure with a mouth.”

  “Speak your mind next time, won’t you?”

  “I am being scrupulously polite.”

  “Good, good. Look, the chances are, they know nothing about that.”

  “Naturally, they have never endured his company. And rather than disappoint them by explaining these details, I am very happy to appear within their photograph and to represent an honourable part of the Paris of history.”

  At the time, I found this new hobby slightly embarrassing, but I do like to think now of the slides and videos and snapshots in the homes of all nations, each containing a small impossible addition, beaming selflessly in the background.

  To tell the truth and shame the devil, I wish I had all of the pictures here. I never did take any myself and without them I have almost nothing left. You know, you must know, that when I finish writing this there will be so little of him here with me I can’t think what to do. F
or almost a year I’ve had my own doubled life within the present. I can tell you exactly how it feels to be this way, all the sensations are natural, focused, strong, entirely normal and I want no part of them. If this is normality I would rather have something else. How can it be that a tick or two of electricity in the meat that fills my skull can be worse than a blow, worse than disease, worse than any fear I can imagine. The movements of my own body, the rooms of my own house, the loveliest of my memories are only pain. I want amnesia.

  But of course I don’t. In only weeks, I found that I could not hold the image of his face in my mind with any clarity—apparently a common problem, very normal among the bereaved. My will has no power to bring him back, even in thought. And against my will, in moments with no logic, no kindness to them, the whole sense of him—the touch, the scent, the taste—will slice in sharper than fire. He walks through me, atom by atom, but he never stays.

  I won’t go on about it—that would make no sense. When we first came to Paris, I had only as much knowledge of our future together as made it possible for me to be unreasonably happy, that is to say, without feeling the need for any particular fixed or permanent reason. Perhaps I had at the back of my thinking the dark idea that Savinien might want to stay in France—that it might, indeed, be extremely difficult for him to leave it, but I was filled with the sense that we would conquer whatever difficulties arose, just as we had before.

  Our first night, the 20th of July, we lay uncovered together, under the pressing, lapping half light of our little room. Our opened window let in hot air and din. Savinien had been initially disappointed to find that his idea of an hotel and its modern translation involved a considerable step down in accommodation, but was equally, if not perversely pleased to find we were staying in a narrow, raucous alley off the rue Saint-Jacques. The tiny street was lined with lurid food stalls and shops selling amulets or alchemical books. The glistening cobbles underfoot drained into a central open gutter full of dark water and cabbage leaves.