Aileen took a huge slug of gin. ‘Don’t be such a prick, Douglas. Just say what you really want to say.’
Brent sat up. The room bulged with anger. He braced himself for whatever was coming next.
20 April
Piano
For about a month, every morning on my way to the paper shop, I heard a piano being played when I passed a particular block of flats. It was a 1970s block, worn and shabby, with a door at the common entrance that badly needed a new coat of paint. I had a sense, probably from the handwritten labels taped onto the entryphone system, that many of those flats were occupied by people who didn’t stay long: students, maybe, or workers on short-term contracts. But for those four or five weeks, on a daily basis, I heard piano music drifting from an open window on the ground floor, and I thought this gave the building grace and grandeur, a kind of permanence and solidity that it otherwise lacked.
I have no idea who the player was, because although the window was slightly open there was a grubby blind that was always pulled down so I couldn’t see in. But whoever it was, he or she was very good. Often I heard the same piece of music – not stopping and starting, but flowing with confidence and sensitivity, as if on each occasion the player was trying to extract ever more feeling from the keys. I didn’t recognise the music and I still don’t know what it was because I’ve not heard it again, even though I listen to a great deal of classical music on the radio. Such a lovely piece. It made me pause on the pavement every time.
One day I went by at a different time, and the window was shut but the blind raised. There it was, a glossy, black grand piano, squeezed into the room like a stallion into too small a stable. There wasn’t space for anything else, apart from an unoccupied piano stool.
Not so long after that, a morning came when the music didn’t happen. I looked: the window was shut, the blind up – and the piano was gone. That great, beautiful creature – vanished. I couldn’t believe it. I felt bereft. It was like being in love with someone, who leaves without saying goodbye before you can tell them. It was like waking from a delightful, heartbreaking dream.
21 April
Brothers
‘Leon!’ he called, not loudly. He bent the metal sheet back into place, let his eyes adjust to the dark. ‘Leon! Where are you?’
He could make out the crates they’d turned into chairs, the blankets and bits of cardboard they slept on. He crawled a few more feet, dragging the sack, then was able to crouch. The sack would feel heavy and therefore, at least for a moment, exciting to Leon, who was much smaller than he was. But the haul from the hotel bin wasn’t exciting: two bruised apples, a huge but yellowing lettuce, some overripe tomatoes and half a loaf of day-old bread. Still, he’d make it sound as good as he could. And then there was the special thing he’d lifted from the booth at the hotel entrance. He’d just run past and taken it. The man in the booth was too slow but the doorman had almost grabbed him. He couldn’t go near that hotel for a week now, but it had been worth it. What a prize! A whole, untouched, unbroken bar of chocolate, still in its wrapper!
‘Leon!’ He’d been away longer than usual, and Leon sometimes got frightened, thinking he’d been caught or hurt and wouldn’t be coming back. But he always came back.
He heard a shuffling sound at the back of the hide. Then a match was struck, and Leon’s little face was there. Leon lit the stub of candle they kept for when they ate.
‘Are you okay? I’m sorry I’m late. You won’t believe what I’ve got.’ He pushed the sack over.
‘What?’
‘Have a look. Nice bread, juicy tomatoes, apples – and something else. A surprise.’
‘A surprise? Will I like it?’
‘You’ll love it.’
Leon took out the tomatoes and divided them, three each. He tore the bread into equal pieces. That was his job.
‘What’s this?’
‘A lettuce.’
‘Yuck. Is that the surprise?’
‘No, but you have to eat it first.’
‘It’s like eating grass.’
‘I know, but we have to eat it. Then the apples. Then you get the surprise.’
Leon felt around at the bottom of the sack. In the candlelight a huge smile broke across his dirty face.
22 April
Poison
Something was eating the poison in the woodshed, lots of it, after it had lain untouched all winter. One morning I discovered that the bait, which I’d put into jam-jar lids and placed at various points around the shed, had been either eaten or scattered across the floor, and all the lids moved behind what was left of the winter stack of logs. This was a distance of some ten or twelve feet. A mouse, a whole team of mice, wouldn’t be capable of doing that – even if collecting jam-jar lids was normal mouse behaviour.
The timing didn’t make sense either, although Eddie, my neighbour, said he’d once lived in a farm cottage so cold the mice used to leave at the start of winter and return in spring, like retired Brits with apartments on the Costa del Sol. Four mornings in a row I replaced the lids and replenished the bait, but whatever was eating it seemed immune to the poison. Eddie helped me pull the logs and everything else out of the shed, and we searched for corpses, a nest or some entry route, but found nothing, not even any droppings. Well, there was one round pellet – evidence of nothing really, except maybe constipation. I trawled the internet for images of different kinds of shit – mouse, rat, squirrel, bat, hedgehog – and none of them matched, in shape or quantity. Given how much bait was being consumed, I’d have expected heaps of the stuff.
‘A fox?’ Eddie suggested.
‘No way in or out for a fox,’ I said. ‘Anyway, we’d smell it.’
‘Well, all you can do is keep putting the bait down,’ he said.
‘I hate the idea that I might be killing off a hedgehog that’s just woken up from hibernation,’ I said. ‘Or somebody’s cat. It’s weird. Why would any animal move all the lids like that? What’s the point?’
Eddie shrugged. ‘Maybe tomorrow you’ll open the door and a huge rat will be standing there, wearing armour made from tin lids. And he’ll be very, very pissed off.’
We both laughed, but Eddie laughed loudest and longest. He could afford to. He wasn’t going to have to open the door.
23 April
Flight
Once, when I was about thirteen, I was standing in the middle of my bedroom, not thinking of anything in particular, when a hairbrush flew off the top of the chest of drawers, three feet away, struck me on the arm and fell to the floor. This was quite a surprise. I tried to reconstruct what had happened, looking for a rational explanation. Had I been close enough to knock the hairbrush accidentally? No. Had there been a gust of wind from somewhere, or had the hairbrush been positioned right on the edge of the chest? No. I was forced to conclude that it had indeed flown, propelled by no discernible external force.
Later, I read somewhere that adolescents, subject as they are to great physical, hormonal and emotional changes, may generate some kind of magnetic power that attracts objects. It’s an interesting theory, but one, I suspect, with absolutely no scientific basis.
Yesterday morning, when I was opening the shutters in the sitting-room, I suddenly remembered this incident. I remembered the strangeness of it, the urge I had felt to ‘explain’ it, the mix of thrill and disappointment when I could not. I then indulged myself by carrying out a foolish kind of experiment. Concentrating my mind on a row of objects on the mantelpiece – a candlestick, a postcard, a small dish, a shell, a box of matches, another candlestick – I willed each of these objects in turn to fly from its position. Nothing happened. Could I persuade one of them to budge even a fraction of an inch? No. Recalling that I had not deliberately provoked the original incident with the hairbrush, I turned away and – without seriously expecting a result – considered, not those objects, but the fact that spring was finally here and that I might get out into the garden in the afternoon, to do some tidying up.
Ach well. I went through to the kitchen to make myself some breakfast. As I filled the kettle, something smacked against the window, then fell from view. I went outside. On the ground lay a blue tit – tiny, delicate and, though quite dead, warm with the life that had just left it.
24 April
The Call
for Alan Taylor
Two men are walking through a small town, very late at night, one a few paces ahead of the other. They are on their way home. Home is several miles away. Apart from them, the street is deserted. The town is a place they hardly know, except by reputation. It is not a good reputation.
It would take too long to explain fully why they have ended up where they have, but the chief contributory factors are: drink; a party; pursuit of, as it has turned out, unattainable women; a dearth of transport options, either public or private; and drink.
The men do not speak, but not because they are not on speaking terms. On the contrary, they are old and firm friends. They have simply reached that stage of proceedings when speech is neither useful nor easy. Silence, of the brooding, dogged variety, reigns as they trudge along the street a few feet apart.
In the middle of the town, outside the post office, is a telephone box. (These events take place in the pre-mobile-phone era.) As they pass the box, the phone inside starts to ring. The first man ignores it. The second man pauses, observes his companion forging ahead, seems to weigh up his options, and finally, going over to the box, enters it and picks up the receiver.
‘Is that you?’ says a male voice – a very hard, unpleasant and threatening voice.
‘It is,’ the second man says. Because it is.
‘Stay there,’ the other voice says. ‘I am coming down there now, and I am going to kill you.’
The line goes dead. The man in the telephone box replaces the receiver. He steps out into the street. His companion is now sixty yards away. The second man listens – for the sound of footsteps, or a car engine – but hears nothing.
He starts walking, quickly. After half a dozen paces he breaks into a run. After fifty, when he is close on the heels of the first man, the latter hears him coming. He turns round and takes note of the look on his friend’s face. Still not a word passes between them. The first man, too, starts to run.
25 April
The Total Eclipse of Scotland
On this day, the first recorded total eclipse of Scotland took place. Such events must of course have occurred before, but no one could say for certain when. Advances in astronomy and meteorology meant that for the first time the exact moment and duration of the eclipse could be accurately predicted. As a result there was mass observation of the spectacle.
Despite many scientific reassurances that the eclipse was an entirely natural phenomenon, it was an unnerving seven minutes for many Scots. As the sun, moon and Scotland aligned, the lunar shadow rapidly and ominously spread from west to east across the Outer Hebrides, the inner islands, Argyll, Galloway and Wester Ross, until the whole country was cast into utter darkness, and did not begin to re-emerge for some three minutes.
A not insubstantial minority was convinced that the event must carry some fateful meaning: some said it signified God’s displeasure in a backsliding and licentious people, while others thought it heralded the dawn of a new age for the nation. Pagans, Druids and other practitioners of alternative lifestyles gathered at standing stones and similar prehistoric monuments. Several suicides and a number of never-to-be-solved murders took place during those seven minutes, in places as far-flung as Campbeltown, Cumbernauld and Arbroath, although no convincing evidence that the eclipse was responsible has ever been produced.
Civic Scotland responded in different ways. In Edinburgh, a fireworks display on the castle battlements marked the occasion. In Inverness, pubs were allowed, indeed encouraged, to stay open for twenty-four hours as refuges for the nervous or superstitious. Along the 96-mile border with England, relays of cyclists, runners and, in the Tweed, swimmers, ‘raced’ the eclipse from Gretna to Berwick, cheered on by thousands of spectators: those to the south, bathed in sunshine, enjoyed marvellous views, while those to the north, plunged in gloom, were unable to see a thing.
In a post-eclipse opinion poll, thirty-five per cent of the population said the eclipse should become an annual event; twenty-five per cent said they would prefer a total, and permanent, eclipse of England; and the remainder said they didn’t care what was eclipsed so long as they got the day off work.
26 April
Ghost Ships
The new blocks of flats at the waterfront do not look to him, from half a mile away, like blocks of flats at all. They are battleships – vast, towering, grey, black, all plated sides and gleaming spars, bridges, walkways and projecting platforms, different faces of steel and armoured glass, and all with a lack of symmetry, as if the naval designers, keeping pace with advancing technology, couldn’t stop adding extra layers of defence or methods to detect the enemy. In the sunshine and against the few swiftly moving white clouds these giants seem to lean into the stiff easterly breeze, straining at their anchors, ready to put to sea.
Between the flats and where he stands is an old dock with a decaying wharf, and beyond that a man-made spit extending far out into the water like a runway. Piles of rubble, concrete blocks and heaps of gravel punctuate this spit at irregular intervals. There, another two of the battleship blocks were supposed to be built, but they never were, because the property bubble burst. Their ghostly absence makes the ones that were completed seem very far away. He imagines people in them watching the shoreline from their windows, waving frantically, seasick, wanting to be brought back to land.
But they can’t be brought back. At the peak of the boom the biggest apartments out there went for as much as £750,000. Now they can’t be sold for half that. Their owners are becalmed, marooned, grounded – whatever marine terminology you prefer – by negative equity. And if it’s grounded they are then the tide is out, and nobody knows when, or if, there will be another tide like it.
‘More money than sense.’ So said many, himself included, who both envied and despised the wealth that was poured into those apartments. He thinks of the old story that when James IV commissioned his warship the Great Michael it was said that all the woods of Fife were used in the building of it. And then came Flodden, and James’s death, and the Great Michael was sold at a knockdown price to the French, who eventually left that mighty vessel to rot in the harbour at Brest.
27 April
Jack and the Shell
Jack was walking by the sea. The sea was a marvel to him. He thought of the strange creatures that lived in it. What was it like to be a flounder or a jellyfish, or one of the things that had lived in the shells he collected from the beach?
On the road home, he stopped to take one of these shells from his pocket for another look. It was shaped like a swirl of ice cream without its cone. He put it to his ear and heard the sea. How had the snail, or whatever it was, lived in such a narrow space? He put his eye to the open end, squinting at the inner spiral. He pressed his eye hard into the shell.
There was a nasty popping sound, and Jack suddenly found that his whole head was inside the shell. The sea was very loud. He tried to pull his head out, but the shell was too tight. Weel, he thought, if I canna gang back I’ll hae tae gang on. So he squeezed his shoulders in, and his arms, and then, gripping hard with both hands, managed to pull his legs in too.
Noo I’ll turn roond and get oot, he thought. But he couldn’t turn. He was completely stuck. The constant roar of the sea was deafening.
‘Help!’ Jack shouted. ‘Help!’
A passing gull, hearing his cry, said to itself, There’s a shell wi somethin alive in it. It flew down, picked up the shell and dropped it from a great height. The shell smashed on the road, and Jack burst out, the same size as ever – far too big for a gull to eat. The bird flew off, but not before leaving a long yellow streak down Jack’s back as a mark of i
ts disappointment.
‘Och, Jack,’ his mother said when he arrived home. ‘Look at yer jersey! Aw covered in shite.’
‘But it’s lucky when a bird does that, Mither,’ Jack said.
‘It’s no lucky for me that has tae wash it,’ she said. ‘Gie it ower, ye daft gowk.’
But Jack knew how lucky he’d been. It’s not every day you narrowly miss being a seagull’s dinner.
28 April
Nostalgia
‘That place,’ Mick said. ‘Christ, what a hole.’
‘Anyway, I was back up there last week, for work,’ Tom said. ‘First time in years. So I had to take a turn round the old haunts, didn’t I? Well, half the street was gone. Our building – completely demolished. You know what’s there instead? A health centre.’
Mick was laughing so much he had to put his glass down. There was something desperate about the way he laughed, Tom thought.
‘That’s brilliant,’ Mick spluttered. ‘Maximum points for irony, eh?’
When Tom went up for another round, Mick slipped outside for a fag. The pub was quiet but then it was a Monday. Tom checked his messages. Nothing from Geraldine. Not that he’d expected anything. Tom and Geraldine, for God’s sake. What future other than one of continual strife could there be for a couple with those names?
Mick was a mess. Tom would have to sub him all night, so would be responsible for them both getting pissed again. He didn’t know if he could go on meeting him like this, for the old times. What were the old times now? They were over. You either waded in alcoholic nostalgia or moved on. He wondered why he’d mentioned the flat. Why he’d gone back at all.
365 Page 14