‘It’s hard to believe it, but in the Soviet Union in those days, it was very risky to write a poem like this, because it didn’t scan and it didn’t rhyme and it wasn’t all about Lenin, or tractors.’
Billy put up his hand. ‘Sir – what’s “Lenin”?’
Teddy turned around in his seat with his nose wrinkled up in disgust. ‘Are you some kind of ignoramus, or what? Haven’t you ever heard of the Lenin Tower of Pisa?’
Jim said, ‘Ignore him, Billy. Lenin’s a who, not a what. Go home. Google him. This is English, not History. Now here’s the poem.’
He read ‘Beyond The Horizon’ directly to Patsy-Jean, looking into her eyes as he did so, searching for some clue to her state of mind. She didn’t look in any way distressed, or desperate, but then Jim remembered what his own mother had been like, on the day that she had committed suicide. Two months after she had discovered that she had terminal ovarian cancer, she had taken thirty-five paracetamol and drunk a whole bottle of Smirnoff. But when Jim had talked to her at breakfast that morning, she had seemed so calm, so much at peace with herself. Blissful, even. It had been the calm of a woman who had made her choice; and had chosen to go no further. Jim read:
‘All of us vanish
eventually
beyond the horizon
But you have vanished
beyond the horizon
like the passing day
While I am still rising and falling like the shadow of a cloud
over the dunes
The wind is rising –
the grass is dancing
where have you gone?
When I reach the horizon
will you be there?
Or will I see only another horizon
and then another horizon
and then another
beyond which you will vanish
successively
and forever?’
T.D. said, with exaggerated seriousness, ‘You know somethin’, sir. There just ain’t no answer to that.’
Jim closed the book. ‘Maybe it doesn’t seem like it, not at first. But then maybe there is.’
‘Seems to me like there’s two too many horizons,’ put in Teddy.
‘That’s a good point,’ said Jim. ‘What Vasiliev is saying, in effect, is that we can never reach the horizon, no matter how far we travel. It’s always beyond our reach. It’s very short, this poem, and it’s very simple, but it raises all kinds of fascinating questions about the way we see our lives unfolding, and the way we think of time passing us by, and the way we relate to other people.’
‘I think it’s really sad,’ said Janice.
‘Yes,’ said Jim. ‘It’s quite a lonely poem, isn’t it? It has an overwhelming sense of loss. You feel that the love of Vasiliev’s life has disappeared, and he’s not at all sure that he’s ever going to be able to find her again.’
The bell rang. Jim said, ‘OK . . . we’ll talk about this some more tomorrow. Meanwhile, I want you to think about other things that affect us but we can’t control. Like the weather, for instance.’
‘Or growing older,’ said Kim.
‘Yes, Kim. Like growing older.’
He went into the Cat’n’Fiddle for a drink before he returned home. He sat up at the bar, loosened his necktie and ordered a bottle of Fat Tire. He was served by the same bartender who had served him yesterday evening, but then he wasn’t at all sure that he had really been here yesterday evening. Even if he had, the barman seemed to have forgotten that he had stiffed him out of a tip, because he was friendly and chatty and pushed a large bowl of complimentary pretzels across the bar.
‘You teach, don’t you?’ asked the bartender.
‘That’s right. English.’
‘English? Like Shakespeare, right?’
‘Sure. Some Shakespeare.’
‘I always wanted to be an actor, you know. I mean that’s why I came out to Hollywood in the first place. I was an extra in War Of The Worlds, with Tom Cruise. I had to run down the street and get melted by the Martians. Then Portal Pictures were doing this remake of a Korean horror flick, and I got a walk-on part as a doorman. I even had a couple of lines of dialog.’
‘That’s great,’ said Jim. ‘That’s very good. What were they?’
‘Excuse me? What were what?’
‘The lines. The lines you had in this Korean horror flick.’
‘Oh! I had to stop this woman going through this door and say, “You really don’t want to go any further, ma’am. You don’t want to go through this door, I promise you.”’
‘That was it?’
‘Yes. But I had to say them real meaningful. Like, I had to give the impression that if she decided to go through the door, she’d be in real serious shit, if you know what I mean.’
‘What was it called?’ Jim asked him.
‘What was what called?’
‘The Korean horror flick. What was it called?’
The bartender shrugged. ‘I don’t know. They never finished it. I think they ran out of money or the talent got sick or something. I never found out. The working title was Demon’s Door.’
‘What was the storyline?’
The bartender slowly shook his head. ‘I’m not too sure. All I had to do was wear this green doorman’s uniform and reach forward and take hold of this door handle and say, “You really don’t want to go any further, ma’am. You don’t want to go through this door, I promise you.” And the director told me that I had to sound – what was the word? Portentous. Would that be right? I mean, you’re an English teacher.’
‘Yes,’ said Jim. ‘Portentous. It means “ominous, portending evil.” It can also mean “pompous” but I doubt if your director wanted you to sound like some self-important windbag.’
‘Portentous,’ the bartender repeated, with satisfaction, almost as if he had coined the word himself.
‘But . . . you don’t know what you were being portentous about?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘You don’t know what was on the other side of that door? You don’t know why you were warning that woman not to go through it?’
The bartender shrugged. ‘I never saw the whole script, only the page with my lines on it. The director said, “Read the lines and sound portentous,” and that was it.’
‘OK,’ Jim told him. ‘Thanks. I think I’ll have another brew.’
‘Sure thing.’
Outside, the jazz trio began to tune up. A few scattered scales on the piano, a few random squiggles on the alto sax. A throaty-sounding woman sang, ‘I went down to St James’ Infirm’ry . . . saw my baby there . . .’ It was then that the tawny-haired girl in the glittery purple mini-skirt came out of the darkness and perched herself on the stool right next to him, crossing her legs.
She sniffed, and ran her finger under her nose, and said, ‘You look sad, mate.’
‘Me? No, I’m not sad. A little confused, maybe. But not sad. And before you ask me if I feel like a shag, how would you like a drink?’
‘You’re a bit bloody cheeky. Vodka and tonic, if you don’t mind.’
Jim beckoned to the bartender and ordered her drink. Then he turned back to her and said, ‘Do you recognize me?’
‘Why, are you famous?’
‘No, not at all. I just want to know if you’ve ever seen me before.’
The girl frowned at him. ‘Can’t say I do, mate. But I don’t usually come in here till later.’
‘Did you see me in here yesterday evening, round about this time?’
The girl continued to frown. She opened her mouth as if she were about to say something but then she closed it again.
‘I was right here,’ said Jim. ‘I was sitting on the same stool.’
The girl said, ‘No . . . no, I couldn’t have seen you. I didn’t come in here yesterday. Alex! Did I come in here yesterday evening?’
The bartender thought about it, and then said, ‘I don’t think so. But, you know. Every evening is pretty much like every
other evening.’
Jim said, ‘OK, then. Forget it. It doesn’t really matter.’
The girl lifted her glass and said, ‘Cheers for the drink. Do you still want that shag?’
‘Thanks for the offer, sweet cheeks, but it’s a little early in the day for me. I have to be going.’ Jim climbed off his stool and made sure that he left a twenty on the bar. Next time he came in, the bartender might remember that he hadn’t left him a tip.
When he unlocked the door of his apartment, he was surprised that Tibbles didn’t come running out into the hallway to greet him, like he usually did. ‘Tibbles!’ he called out, as he closed the door behind him. ‘Where are you, you idle moggie? I bought you Instinctive Choice shrimp! And tuna, too! And some dry crunchy things which are supposed to stop you getting gas!’
He went into the kitchen and put down his sack of groceries on the counter. Then he walked through to the living room. ‘Tibbles! Where the hell are you? You haven’t been sleeping on my pillow again?’
He went into his bedroom, but there was no sign of Tibbles there, either. He thought: Don’t tell me he managed to escape this morning, when I was closing the door. I’m sure that I locked him inside.
He returned to the living room. It was nearly eight o’clock now and it was growing dusky outside. He walked over to the windows to draw the drapes, but as he did so a huge crow flapped into the air, right outside, and let out a raucous skrrarrrkkk! He said, ‘Shit!’ out loud and stepped back with his heart thumping.
The crow flew off, but only as far as the apartment block on the other side of the yard, where twenty or thirty more crows were perched on the rooftop, cawing and shuffling and pecking at the tiles. Jim went out on to the balcony. Flocks of urban crows gathered here almost every afternoon during the winter months and made a nuisance of themselves, like a gang of bikers, but he had never seen them so early in the year.
It was then that Jim saw what had attracted them. Lying on his back on the sunbed next to him was Tibbles, dead and crushed, his fur matted with dried blood, just where Jim had left him after he had run him down. The crows had already taken his eyes, so his sockets were hollow and empty, and they had torn at his abdomen, too, and pulled out yellowish strings of intestines.
A warm tide of bile and beer suddenly flooded into Jim’s mouth, and he tilted himself over the railing to spit it out into the yard below. He stayed there for a few moments, his head bowed, his eyes watering, his stomach clenching. Then he slowly stood up straight and looked down at Tibbles’ ravaged remains in horror and disbelief.
If this was the Tibbles he had killed, where was the living Tibbles that Kim had brought him in a cat basket? Where was the Tibbles he had fed this morning, before he left for college? How could a dead cat come to life again, when it must have been dead all the time? From the condition it was in, Tibbles’ body must have been lying here for at least twenty-four hours. It already smelled strongly of sweet, decayed flesh, mingled with rotten shrimp.
Jim swung round toward the crows, clustered on top of the apartment block.
‘Get the hell out of here!’ he screamed at them. ‘Go on, you bastards! Get the hell out!’
A few of them fluttered up into the air for a few seconds, but then hopped back on to the tiles, cawing at Jim in defiance. He picked up the trowel he used for his houseplants and flung it at them as hard as he could, but it fell short of the roof and landed with a clatter on to the balcony of one of the third-story apartments opposite. Almost at once, a white-haired woman opened the balcony door to find out what the noise was about, and with an explosive rustle of wings, the crows all flew away.
‘What in the blue blazes is going on?’ the woman called out. ‘Did you just throw something at my winder?’
‘The crows, ma’am!’ Jim called back. ‘I was just trying to scare them off! They do so much damage! Sorry if I startled you!’
‘Huh!’ said the woman. ‘You be more careful in future, that’s all I can say! You can’t go throwing stuff at people’s winders, willy-nilly! Something’s going to get broke!’
‘Yes, ma’am! Sorry, ma’am!’
NINE
Jim went back inside his apartment. From the bottom of his bedroom closet he lifted out a cardboard box full of old bank statements and letters and Polaroid photographs and assorted souvenirs, like a snow globe from Milwaukee and a luminous plastic Statue of Liberty. He found two pictures of his mother, sitting on the beach in Sarasota, Florida, and a black-and-white picture of his grandfather, Roland Rook, when he was serving with the 34th Infantry in Pusan in 1950. As usual his grandfather was grinning and giving the thumbs-up, and as usual he had his arm around a pretty Korean girl. Jim looked at it for a while, remembering his grandfather’s laugh and his gravelly voice. Then he emptied all the contents into two shopping bags and carried the empty box out on to the balcony.
The crows were returning already, some of them sitting on the roof and others circling slowly in the air. There was no point in him shouting at them, and he didn’t want to risk throwing anything else. He didn’t want to upset the neighbors any more than he had to.
He set the box down on the floor of the balcony and snapped on a pair of red household gloves. ‘Tibbles, I don’t know what to tell you about this. I still can’t understand what happened. One minute you were alive and then you were dead and then you were alive again and now you’re dead again. Does that make any kind of sense to you? Because it makes no sense to me. None whatsoever.’
Tibbles stared up at Jim with empty eye sockets, and his teeth were bared in a vicious-looking snarl, as if he were furious with Jim for killing him and then leaving his body to the mercy of the crows.
‘I can’t give you much of a funeral,’ Jim told him. ‘I can’t afford the Pet Memorial Park. Besides, you were only a cat, after all. I know that doesn’t sound very appreciative. You were a pretty interesting cat, as cats go. But you would have made a very boring human.’
He lifted Tibbles’ floppy, decaying body into the cardboard box and closed the top. The smell was so ripe and so cloying that he almost brought up some more beer, but he took a deep breath and quickly sealed the box with brown parcel tape, and after a few minutes the smell faded. In the morning he would take the box to college with him, and ask Dunstan the janitor to throw it into the incinerator.
He slid the balcony door shut, locked it, and went into the kitchen to open up another bottle of Fat Tire. When he returned to the living room, he tugged the drapes across the windows. He didn’t want to sit looking at that cardboard box knowing that Tibbles was lying dead inside it, rotting, and that he was to blame.
He felt bruised. Mystified, confused, angry and bruised – as if he had been comprehensively beaten up by some berserk assailant who wouldn’t tell him why he was doing it.
Yesterday he had lived through a day that may or may not have happened. Today he had lived through a day in which yesterday was mostly forgotten, but not completely – even if it hadn’t happened. And he wasn’t the only one who had some kind of phantom memory of it. Walter Armbruster had felt that he had turned up at college, too – and even the girl in the Cat’n’Fiddle had had to think twice about where she had been the evening before.
Then there was Maria. Yesterday she had been a bloody mess, lacerated to ribbons, today she was completely unscathed. And Tibbles: dead, resurrected, now dead again. Jim could have banged his head against the wall in sheer bewilderment.
He took a shower and put on his faded Walt Whitman T-shirt and his blue-and-white stripy shorts. He heated a pepperoni pizza in the oven but only managed to eat two slices of it because he kept thinking about Tibbles’ empty eye sockets. He put the rest in the fridge even though he knew that he would only throw it away tomorrow.
He watched TV for a while, a long documentary about Gnawa music in Africa – a mystical kind of music which was used to raise djinns or spirits. It was warbling and monotonous, punctuated by hollow knockings from iron castanets called qraqabs, which sounded
like somebody hopelessly trying to get out of a metal coffin.
After twenty minutes, he realized that he wasn’t really listening, so he switched off the television, went to the front door and stepped out on to the landing. It was a warm, blowy night, and the yuccas were gossiping to each other as if they knew that he was worried, and in trouble. Did you see what happened to his cat? Did you hear what happened when he went to class today?
He was almost tempted to shout at them to shut up, but then he realized that shouting at trees would really show that he had lost his marbles.
He held on to the railing and closed his eyes, feeling the breeze on his face. Whatever was happening to him and Special Class Two, he had to find out what it was and straighten it out. He was afraid to go to bed in case he woke up fifty years older, and even if he managed to get some sleep he was afraid of what the morning might bring. What if the sun rose tomorrow but it was still the first day of the fall semester, all over again?
He opened his eyes again. As he turned to go back into his apartment, however, he saw a figure standing on the opposite side of Briarcliff Road, just at the point where it began its steep curve down to Foothill Drive. It was the woman in the black wide-brimmed hat with the veil, and the shiny gray robe. She was standing quite still, by the cast-iron railings which ran along the frontage of number 5754. Beneath the brim of her hat her face was in deep shadow, so that he couldn’t see if she had a fox-like snout or not, but her posture was strange, slightly leaning forward with both hands held up in front of her, like a four-legged animal sitting up on its hind legs and begging.
Maybe he should go down and confront her, ask her what the hell she wanted. On the other hand, what if she turned into that bristling beast again, and what if, this time, he didn’t escape so lightly?
He was still watching her when he saw one of his neighbors from further up the road, Wilbert Funkel, climbing the hill with Charlie, his Boston terrier. Wilbert was in his mid-fifties, with heavy-rimmed spectacles, a thinning white pompadour, and a red and yellow Hawaiian shirt. As they came closer to the woman in the hat, Charlie started to yap and growl, and turn around and around in circles, until he became hopelessly tangled up in his leash and almost tripped Wilbert up.
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