On the street, between him and the ministerial car, stood a woman. She looked about sixty, but it was hard to tell.
‘Could you spare a pound, sir?’ she said.
‘What?’
‘You see, if you give me a pound, and if I can get a pound from thirteen other people this week, then I’ll be all right.’
‘What do you mean?’ the Minister asked.
‘They’ve changed the benefit system,’ the woman said. ‘I live in a council flat, and because I have a spare bedroom they’re cutting my housing benefit by £14 a week. And if I can’t make up the difference I’ll have to move out, though God knows where to. But I just can’t afford to lose that kind of money.’
‘But surely you don’t need the extra room?’ the Minister asked.
‘It was my daughter’s room. She still comes and stays once a week, to help me out with things. It’s been difficult since my husband died.’
‘Your husband is dead?’ the Minister said. ‘Did you share a bedroom with him?’
‘Oh yes, right to the end. We loved each other very much.’
‘Then you not only have a spare bedroom, you yourself have a double bedroom, is that correct?’
‘Yes, but if you could spare a pound that wouldn’t matter.’
‘Matter?’ the Minister roared. ‘Of course it matters. Out of my way, you greedy, thieving, idle woman. How dare you waste my time for the trifling sum of £14.’
This story is grotesquely exaggerated, crudely simplistic and politically biased. At the same time, however, not a word of it is a lie.
3 April
Imagination
There was once a man so old that most of his family, and all of his friends, had left the world long before him. He had been in ‘the war’, and when he spoke of that time it seemed to anyone watching that he was not only mentally but also physically reliving his experiences. Even when, overcome by the power of imagination, he lapsed into silence, his legs and arms would jerk and twitch, his whole body move as he refought battles. His young relatives, for whom ‘the war’ was only history, were thankful that they had not had to undergo such experiences.
Increasingly infirm, and having gradually but completely lost his sight, the old man had to move into a residential home. One morning the staff found his room empty, his bed not slept in. A search was undertaken, but without success. Then the telephone rang. A neighbour had discovered him outside his old house, cold but in good spirits. She was now giving him his breakfast. How, though, had he got there during the night? The house was five miles away, along a complicated route, and he was a blind nonagenarian who could not ordinarily reach the dining-room without assistance.
When questioned, he vigorously denied phoning for a taxi or having been given a lift. He had walked all the way with his comrades, he said – naming three men who had been dead seventy years – and whenever one of the party had tired the others had taken it in turns to support him as they went. He never wavered from this account, and no other explanation of how he had made that journey was ever found. A few weeks later he had a fall, and shortly after that he died.
It was the old man’s grandson who told me of that last march. The story has stayed with me ever since. It makes me think of the dying Balzac, who looked at his doctor and cried out, ‘Send for Blanchion!’ When mere mortal physician could do no more for him, the author called for one of his own characters. And who can say that Blanchion did not come, and did not bring relief?
4 April
Skin
When I was still some distance from the village, I came upon two young boys playing beside the road. They took one look at me and fled, screaming, never before having seen anyone like me. By the time I arrived at the houses, word of me had spread, and I was surrounded by an army of children. The infants regarded me with a mixture of terror and astonishment, clinging tightly to their bigger brothers and sisters. The older children exhibited more curiosity than fear, and one bold girl, approaching me, licked her fingertips and rubbed them on my lower arm to see if I was painted. Greatly amused to find that I was not, she encouraged the others to check for themselves. A detailed investigation of my skin, hands, hair, ears, nose and lips ensued. I submitted to this with good grace, for it was a remote village, and it was clear that though tales or even pictures of men and women such as myself might have reached there, none of my examiners had ever seen the genuine article in flesh and blood.
The innocence of those few minutes was to me a delight I shall never forget. There was neither malice nor suspicion nor revulsion in their attitude towards me: I was simply different and therefore, for a while at least, exotic. But then the adults began to appear, polite and not hostile, yet infinitely more reserved. They shooed the children away, as if they were a nuisance to me, or I a danger to them. I saw doubt and mistrust in those adult eyes. I might have come bearing dirt or disease, or with a strange faith, or with moral standards that they did not share. The men might suspect me of coveting their women, the women might expect me to fight their men. I was different, and so I represented change, and most people are afraid of change.
And there was something else. I was only one. One might be tolerated. A few might be acceptable. But what if there were more like me – smiling, peaceful, apparently wanting nothing, but on their way in their thousands, their tens and hundreds of thousands?
5 April
The Man Upstairs
The bus is just over the bridge when a procession of folk comes down from the top deck – not to get off, but to find themselves other seats.
‘There’s a fellow up there being sick,’ a woman tells the driver. He nods. It’s obvious he doesn’t want to know. It’s his bus but it’s not his bus.
She comes to the back and says it again, as if we can’t hear the retching and the rattle of vomit on the floor above our heads. ‘Oh, he’s terribly sick,’ she adds, after another volley.
‘Is it drink?’ an old man asks.
‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘But he’s not well.’
Trainers appear on the stairs. Is this him? No. It’s a young fellow in a tracksuit, alert, buzzing, fresh-faced, who launches himself from the bus at the next stop. Surely our man would be sweaty and pale, shivering and feverish, not flying off like a gymnast? And nobody said, ‘Better now, son?’ Nobody said, ‘That was him.’
The bingo halls are coming up. The women rise like a wave and head for the exit.
‘You’ll be sick if you don’t win tonight,’ the old man says, cackling.
The woman laughs back, shaking her head. ‘I’d rather go home penniless than be the one that has to clean this bus tonight.’
So now the lower deck is half empty, or perhaps that should be half full. Upstairs everything has gone very quiet. All that was in him must have come out. What next? Maybe he’s embarrassed, afraid, reluctant to show his face. I’m trying to picture the scene up there. Has he moved seats? Is anybody else still with him? Is he conscious? Dead?
The bus’s tyres rumble over the tarmac, the wipers thud back and forth across the glass. There are just a handful of us now, all with our own thoughts, or not with them. And upstairs, some man – dead, or not dead. Somebody should go and check. I should go. But I don’t move. I sit exactly where I am, anticipating two things – my stop, and his spattered shoes staggering down the stairs – and I am not sure which I want to see first.
6 April
The Blue Plaque (1)
Having wrapped up all his meetings by midday, Douglas could devote the afternoon to Aileen, who had come with him, desperate to enjoy the city after the long, hard, northern winter and the completion of her new novel. They saw an exhibition at the National Gallery, ate an early dinner in Soho, then decided to stroll back to their hotel in Bloomsbury for a nightcap before bed.
Aileen kept pointing out the blue plaques, commemorating musicians, athletes, philosophers, scientists, politicians, inventors and so forth, that were displayed on the buildings in which they had been bo
rn, or had lived or worked. To Douglas she seemed almost infatuated by the plaques.
‘There’s even one at 221b Baker Street,’ Aileen said, ‘although not an official one. I saw it yesterday.’
‘What were you doing in Baker Street?’
‘I went to the Sherlock Holmes Museum, I told you.’
‘So you did. Sorry. Is that where it is?’
‘Well, of course. That’s where he had his rooms, at Mrs Hudson’s.’
‘Ah yes,’ Douglas said. Surely, he thought, Sherlock Holmes was an invention?
They had entered a square, on the far side of which stood their hotel. He quickened his pace, but Aileen had homed in on yet another bloody plaque, on a narrow, brick-built house with a grey door and shuttered windows.
‘Look how bright and blue it is!’ she said. ‘It must be very new.’
‘There’s the hotel, darling,’ he said. ‘Let’s get that drink.’
‘Wait a minute!’ she called. ‘You won’t believe this. It’s got your name on it! Your exact name!’
He returned nervously. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s not that uncommon a combination.’
‘It’s completely uncommon! Look, it even says “Architect”. How creepy! Oh!’ Her tone suddenly changed, the frivolity draining away. ‘It says you lived here from … four years ago to … last year. And, Douglas, the date of your death! You’ve only got two years left!’
‘Darling, what are you talking about? That’s not me. It’s someone else with the same name.’
But she was staring at him as if the plaque told the truth, and he had uttered some ridiculous, betraying fiction.
He moved towards her. Even as he did, she rang the doorbell.
7 April
The Blue Plaque (2)
Douglas and Aileen stood in front of the blue plaque, together but separate, each trying to make sense of what they were seeing: his name on it, the authoritative statement that he had lived at that address for three years, and the unavoidable inference, from the dates given, that he would be dead in another two. Aileen rang the bell a second time.
‘It must be some kind of joke,’ Douglas said while they waited.
‘So you keep saying. I don’t find it funny, Douglas.’
‘It’s nothing to do with me,’ he snapped back. ‘I’m not amused either, by the way. Anyway, I thought you had to be dead before you got one of these things put up.’
‘Not long to go, apparently,’ she said.
‘How many times do I have to tell you? It’s not me.’
‘It’s you all right. Who else could it be? The only question is what you’ve been doing down here for the last three years. On your business trips.’ She did not so much say the word ‘business’ as spit it on the pavement.
Douglas lost his temper. ‘For Christ’s sake, stop talking as if we’re in the middle of one of your stupid paranormal novels. This is either a sick joke or a complete coincidence. And obviously, if it’s the former, it’s wrong on two important counts. First, I’ve never lived in this house, in fact until five minutes ago I didn’t know of its existence. And second, I’m not dead, nor do I intend to be in two years’ time. So will you please get those facts into your infantile little head?’
He felt infuriated, justified and terrified. What made him so angry was that it was just like one of her novels. If he could only hang on for another page or another minute, he would wake up and it would all be over. It probably was anyway, after what he had just said about her writing.
They heard steps behind the grey door. A woman, less glamorous than Aileen but considerably younger, opened it. Although she raised her eyebrows, she did not seem particularly surprised.
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘it’s you.’ And then: ‘And who’s this?’
8 April
The Fox in the Attic
I don’t know how he got up there – how could he get up there? – but one night I woke and heard his movements, and knew at once, by some instinct I cannot explain, what I was hearing. After that first time I used to listen out for him pacing the joists, testing the spaces in between. Heavier than a mouse, subtler than a squirrel, not panicky like a bird. He was clever, understanding that the plaster beneath the insulation material wouldn’t take his weight. I would hear him in my dreams, sniffing and pawing at the dust. Then I’d wake, and hear him for real.
That summer, which began so dry, was one of the wettest on record. After three days of particularly solid, unrelenting rain I needed to check the roof. I didn’t want to disturb him but it had to be done.
I poised the ladder, lifted the hatch and hauled myself up. Searching the underside of the roof for signs of leaks, I smelled his wildness. When my torch scanned the farthest shadows, I saw two diamonds flashing in the beam. The roof was sound.
Common sense told me that he could not stay there indefinitely. I placed a dish of water by the hatch, and left the hatch open and the ladder in position when I descended. That night I left the door into the garden ajar, and slept with my bedroom door and the doors into all the other rooms shut tight. I left biscuits at intervals along this exit route. And somehow I did sleep.
In the morning he was gone. He left a few auburn hairs on the rungs of the ladder, a dusty paw print on the stair carpet, and the crumbs of his hunger in the back lobby.
I closed up the hatch, put away the ladder and washed the empty dish. I felt sad but I had no reason to be. I consoled myself with thoughts of him running in the hills, in the woods, his tail a flaming bush of freedom.
I think of him often, even now. I miss him. I wish he would come again into my dreams, but he never does.
9 April
Voices
A voice came from the radio, then another, and another. Rich, old, rough. Regional voices: sounds made by working people of the not so long ago, from places broken and crushed, covered over and landscaped, or just left to rust and rot. Like voices from the early days of wireless, without the scratch and crackle. Men remembering, not the Thirties or the War, but the war of thirty years ago. Blink and you’re back there. Like yesterday.
‘She was a fighter, I’ll give her that. She fought for her class. I don’t blame her for it. She was against us and we were against her. When you pull on your boots and go down a stinking pit on a cold, dark, winter’s morning, you go with other men and there’s comradeship in that, solidarity. That’s what we were, a community, and she attacked us. What could we do but fight back? It was our lives.’
‘It’s a mistake to make a monster of her. There are people holding street parties – I saw it on the telly. Most of that lot weren’t born, it’s just an excuse. I won’t dance on her grave but I’ll raise a glass to her going. If she was a monster does that mean the monster is slain? They’d have you believe it. Do you think when the tabloids print BEAST across the face of a child molester it’ll never happen again? It’s human nature, like it or not. She may be dead but what she stood for’s alive and well.’
‘You had to take sides. That was how it was. And nothing has changed, whatever anyone tells you. The only thing that’s changed is all the politicians have gone over to the other side. All educated together, all sound the same, all with the same policies. Who represents people like us in that place today? Nobody I can see. Nobody I hear.’
They were there for a few minutes, those voices, then they were gone. And the tales they told were true, but truer still were the sounds they made in the telling. You don’t hear them any more. You just don’t hear them. It was like listening to ghosts.
10 April
Allison Gross
from an old ballad
Ah, well, she is dead at last, the old witch. I for one will not mourn her passing. By the end she was nothing to be afraid of, a tottering crone with a wandered mind, but once she was feared and hated in equal measure. Just to hear her voice made your gorge rise. To look on her brought blood to the eyes.
That time I was up at the tower – her place – I did not mean to go, but she begui
led me with her promises and I lingered. There was something fascinating about her, repulsive though she was.
‘You can be rich,’ she said. ‘You can have anything you like and you can have it now, you can own everything and owe nothing. All I ask in return is that you be my lover.’
I couldn’t do it. ‘No,’ I told her. ‘Get away from me.’
‘But you came to me,’ she said. ‘You must want something.’ And she promised me more, the fat of the land, the jewels of the sea, and the secret knowledge that would conjure fortunes from the air. And I was sorely tempted.
Yet I refused her. Sure I did. I could never have kissed those ugly lips, not for all the gifts in the world.
Then her honeyed words turned sour, and she put a spell on me. I could do nothing to resist. My strength left me, and I fell senseless to the ground.
She made a monstrous worm of me, long and thick and foul – as foul as she was. I was sick and ashamed at what I had become. She laughed as she watched me drag myself about. ‘You should have kissed me when you had the chance,’ she said. ‘You could have had it all.’
Later, the spell she’d cast was cancelled by the Queen of Fairies and I was restored to my proper shape. You can believe that if you like. I do. I have to. Rather that than the alternative, which is that I became so used to my new self that I stopped noticing.
Anyway, the witch is dead and can do no more harm. That’s all that matters, isn’t it?
11 April
The Wife of Usher’s Well
from an old ballad
There lived a wife at Usher’s Well, a woman of substance. She had three sons, big, strapping boys, and she sent them on a trip across the sea.
Barely a week had passed and word came that the ship they had sailed in was lost, with all aboard feared dead.
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