I have no idea what to tell the police. I did not see my assailant. All I remember is light, then darkness. There is no description I can give, no clothing particulars, no age. I hope it was a man – a woolly mammoth – not a boy. I almost wish it had been a gang. Only one man, and I did not see him. What returns are images of ice cream and red wine. I have dreamed of them in my drug-induced sleep. I worry that my purchases still litter the street, that someone should rescue the tub of ice cream. Perhaps the bottle of wine did not break? I do not lament the loss of the rucksack, the phone, the moleskin jacket, the wallet with the creased photographs of the children, my wife. These do not seem as important in comparison. As ice cream. Is that what I can tell them? Would that help? The police are at a loss. An officer advises rest. She will return the next day. Perhaps by then I will remember details.
I am given a cane to help with movement. I am advised not to return to work until ‘you feel up to it’. This is what I have always desired, but now it feels strange. I had wanted time off, but without the pain, the experience of what occurred. Now everything is wrong. Often my hands shake. The children are afraid of me. Sometimes they seem like miniature parents themselves.
‘There, there Daddy,’ my son soothes. He has heard this from my own lips and he uses it now like a palliative, a balm. He strokes my hair in the place where it is thinning, as if I am a small wounded animal. ‘There, there Daddy.’ He is trying to comfort, but his voice is thin with the anxiety of everything: my moods, my wounds, the disturbance. He wants so much for things to be resolved. When I bark at him after his comforting becomes cloying, his eyes widen in disbelief and then his face sets. It is too late to stop this reaction and no matter what I do, the slight trembling of his lower lip gives way to tears.
My daughter watches me now. I hear her squeals and chatter in the background as she plays or fights with her brother, as she talks to her mother, as she gossips with friends. But when I am in the vicinity the noise and laughter subside. She has seen me crush her brother. She will not allow this to happen to her.
‘Can you turn the hall light off?’ I ask, and she burns up carpet to reach the switch. She chides her brother for making unnecessary noise, and praises him when she thinks he is being good. She is an angel. But often I hear them in dispute in another part of the house. They are always fighting, these two.
After several weeks, I return to work. I fly back for a variety of reasons: boredom; I am tired of the children tiptoeing around me, then quarrelling when they are out of reach; I am afraid Rebecca, the new recruit, has usurped my position in the office; I am thirsty for the world outside. I do not admit my wife has stopped treating me like an invalid. She tells me to ‘shift it’ when she appears with the vacuum cleaner. ‘Shouldn’t you get some exercise?’ she says. I wonder what happened to ‘You have your life’, her tears.
Work is a salvation. I lose myself in calculations and signals, in radio contact and camaraderie. Everyone is welcoming. Arnold Christiansen thinks I have returned prematurely, ‘But now that you’re here, we’re glad to have you back on board.’ Even Rebecca smirks behind his back. Everything is familiar. My desk is a friend, my computer a confidante, the radar screen aglow with messages for me to interpret.
I am afraid, though. Has my concentration slipped? Will I guide an aircraft to oblivion? Somehow my senses seem heightened, focused. I notice the scratch the nib of my pen surrenders. The clearances I issue to pilots are flawless, expeditious. Night shifts are no longer a problem. This has taken me away from myself. I am not a person who has lost control. All the same, I have secret fears.
In my absence Geoff nearly choked on a fish bone. ‘They make me change my diet and I nearly snuff it eating trout,’ he snorts. His eyes are Christmas trees sparkling with hundreds of fairy lights. ‘If I play my cards right, it’s first class here I come. I’m talking to a lawyer friend.’ He is already on the Costa, sipping tequila by the pool. ‘Am I right?’ he says. I am back where I belong.
When I was off work my wife woke me one afternoon. I had wallowed in too much sleep and was groggy. ‘Who is Fantasma?’ she asked.
My response was neither appropriate nor coherent. ‘How on earth do I know who Fantasia is?’ I blustered. ‘I’m asleep and drugged and she asks me this?’ I noticed a look in my wife’s eyes, a look I have seen before.
A year ago we were shopping together, but she was making all the decisions. I can’t remember what we bought, but she kept adding items to the trolley. I asked her to keep a mental record of the spend. When it came time to pay, the figure was far in excess of what we had budgeted for and we were forced to leave several items at the till. People stared incredulously, I thought. Some moved to other queues. In the car on the way home my wife chatted as if she had been unaware of the embarrassment. She seemed, to me, too carefree.
‘You’re an imbecile,’ I said. ‘You know that? A fucking fool.’ I couldn’t help it. I said other things then. I was a valve, releasing steam, not knowing when I had become compressed.
She said, ‘Oh.’ And then she was quiet. Her eyes, the way her face was, she looked as if she had lost something, had no idea how to find it again. After a minute she said, ‘I’d like you to stop and get out of the car and make your own way home.’
And I did. I walked for half an hour, then caught a bus to the end of our road, and sat on a low wall, thinking, still stewing. I apologised when I returned an hour later, but she only shrugged as if she couldn’t remember what the apology was for. But she remembered for days and weeks and months. I could tell. There was something in her that had become dormant. Still.
A few months later we gave a dinner party and fretted about the combination of guests. Talkers, mice, swearers, my wife’s born-again best friend. Everyone was beyond tipsy. The conversation flowed and my earlier worries were assuaged. There was a comment about a recent adjustment in interest rates, and the husband of my wife’s best friend was unclear about this. I had drunk too much, I always remind myself. I was not fully conscious of what I was saying. My wife started to explain how she thought a cut in interest rates ought to stave off a recession, the mechanics. She paused at one moment, to collect her thoughts, and I said, ‘Oh, don’t listen to a word she says. She can’t even tally a simple shopping bill.’
I laughed, but in a moment I realised, drunk as they were, no one else had joined in.
‘Only joking,’ I said. I turned to my wife to apologise.
Her face was blank. She sipped her wine. There was that still quality again. The broken conversation began to mend itself. After five minutes, when people had become boisterous again and I considered the matter forgotten, my wife tapped the side of her glass. Everyone fell silent. She gazed at me with that look on her face, the look I will never forget, and she said, ‘Do you remember that time, a while ago, when you spoke to me about the figures? You said they made my head swim, that I was an imbecile.’ Her eyes never left mine for a moment. She did not blink. ‘Can you recall the occasions, the places I was absent without reason? All those times? Can you? Well, can you?’ She sipped her wine and smiled. ‘Remember Paris, that Easter Sunday? That time in the Lakes? Last August bank holiday? Well,’ she sighed contentedly, completely drunk, ‘who’s swimming now?’ And I sat there, not understanding. Panicking. I thought, Who is this person? Where are we now?
It appears to my colleagues that I am on the phone to my wife and the children at every opportunity. I read my son bedtime stories over the telephone when I am on the night shift. His interruptions are no longer taxing. My daughter regales me with tales of school, her new best friend, her mischievous brother. My wife says she misses my presence at home, the time I was convalescing. I joke that I was becoming a nuisance, but she says no, I was merely growing lazy – she liked having me there. I need to hear this reassurance. My fears have not subsided. There are places I will not venture now. I no longer gaze up at the sky to identify tail fins. My eyes are hooded with suspicion. I will move on from this, I tell myself
.
When Arnold Christiansen taps me on the shoulder, I jump. He frowns. One lunchtime Geoff says, ‘Let’s play squash,’ and I look at him as if he is half-crazed. When did this happen, I wonder – trout, squash?
Pilots begin to repeat themselves over the radio and I fear my focus is faltering. The days seem long, too long. Sometimes I steal into the quiet-room for a moment. Arnold Christiansen wakes me one day after I have been asleep for two hours. He does not say anything. At odd moments I ponder my relationship with my wife, where we are, what we have done to one another, and not done.
‘Oh, baby!’ Geoff purrs in the canteen, brushing a pygmy tongue over his lips. For a moment I am convinced Fantasma is back, but then I realise he is ogling Rebecca, the not-so-new recruit. Everything is topsy-turvy.
There is an irritating noise in the canteen, a constant tapping. The woman from Admin is squinting at me. She walks out with her colleagues.
‘What d’you do that for?’ Levinson asks.
‘Do what?’
‘She said “hello” and you just blanked her.’
Geoff doesn’t say anything. Levinson snorts.
The noise is unbearable; I am ready to whirl about to complain when I notice my fork against my plate of toad-in-the-hole, rattling. I watch in fascination as I try to control my hand, stop the shaking. There are people who tear and twist other people’s lives. What kind of a place is this?
Geoff reaches out to steady my arm. ‘Hey,’ he says.
Hey, yourself, I think. But the shaking will not cease. I drop the fork. The world is a window – you look out, you marvel or you are appalled. He is not so bad this Geoff, I think.
I am lying on the pavement looking up at the night sky. I can make out stars between spaces in the clouds. I remember the house, how it would fill with the aroma of just-baked bread. At times of stress or boredom there was bread in abundance. When my mother died, this did not stop; my father gave away the loaves my brother and I could not eat. I worried everything would change in our lives, but he continued with this activity and it gave us all reason to carry on. I miss my mother still; my father has always been there, but my mother – she is a blur, a light that leaves me every single day. Even as a child, shortly after she died, her shape was there. But when I looked up, she would be gone.
My father used to be a hard man who softened occasionally, a flinty beach – the flirt and retreat of his waves. When my mother left, his waves washed up to me and failed to recede. This was, at first, frightening. He worried about my brother and I; every bruise, every illness, every disappointment we experienced. We had grown used to the flirtatious waves. We were not sure about this constant attention, but we grew to accept it when we realised it was going to stay.
At night I speak to my father across the oceans. There is a crackle over the telephone line that makes him sound very old. Perhaps this scares me? Mostly he seems unchanged. I gloss over the details of the incident. I do not want to cause him anxiety. It is enough simply to hear his voice.
Some mornings I wake up and I am afraid. I have a wife, a daughter, a son. There will be days and days and days of this, and in the end it will be forgotten.
MOSES
THE MAN KNELT at the edge of the grave. He dusted away the leaves and the muck with his clean, bare hands. Even though it was warm he had worn his wool blazer. It seemed to wheeze as he moved his arms, his shoulders; he had put on weight since the boy died and now all his clothes complained. A film of perspiration coated his face and neck. His skin sizzled in the unceasing stare of the sun.
The roses he had bought at the train station he lay to one side while he worked to make the place neat. The leaves he scattered on either side of the grave. He snatched a fistful of dead grass and leaves and wilted flowers and stuffed them into his jacket pocket; he could find no other container for these things. He stood and with a handkerchief and spit he wiped the top of the gravestone until it gleamed. He cursed himself for arriving unprepared; there were utensils idling in the kitchen cupboards which would have been useful now. The place where the boy’s name was etched he dabbed and smoothed with the remaining clean patch of cloth. Moses – the name shone in gilt lettering – Moses Lanre Akande. He placed the filthy handkerchief back into his jacket pocket and reached for the fresh flowers on the other side of the grave. He spaced them evenly, in a kind of fan, not sure what he was intending, trying out different effects – splaying them wide, then bunching them up tight again. He pinched and cosseted them with the tips of his fingers so that the petals, the burgundy nap of them, were aligned, none of them threatening to loosen or tumble to the ground, the whole effect pleasing to him somehow.
When he had arranged everything so that there was no more he could achieve, he lowered his knee in genuflection. No thoughts came to him. A train hurtled by and when peace descended again he could make out the sounds of things: the cadence of birdsong, the mischievous whispering of leaves, the crunch of gravel beneath the feet of the few other people in the cemetery as they attended to their own. When he could not remember how long he had been kneeling beside the grave, how long he had remained without a single thought, he opened his eyes, placed a fist on the freshly cut grass and pushed himself up. His bones cracked.
New arrivals were entering the area now, murmuring voices unsettling the calm. The man glanced down at his watch – eleven fifteen – and began to quicken his pace. He did not have to wait long at the station before the train arrived, rushing him back to the centre of things.
At Waterloo he changed to an underground train. A woman approached, holding out a scrap of torn cardboard with what looked like a child’s handwriting. Her body was swathed in loose muslin, her feet encased in rubber slippers which had worn thin at the heels. She held a baby against her hip as she placed her card in front of the man’s face. The English words were basic, the sentence a catastrophe of errors, but the message was conveyed. There was nowhere else the man could look. He stared at the cardboard and then at the baby, its glassy eyes betraying little distress. He shrugged, but the woman would not move. He could not make himself understood and so he closed his eyes. When he opened them again, there was no sign of the woman and the train was arriving at his destination.
‘What time d’you call this?’ a colleague called out when he arrived at work. He had arranged to come in late today, and they knew it, but still they liked to embarrass each other. The man smiled but he did not reply; it was simple banter and there was no harm in it.
The space he worked in was tight and unsuitable for the number of people employed there. It was a room, only slightly larger than his own bedroom, separated by a counter – staff on one side, the public on the other. Customers were forced to squeeze past frames and albums and rolls of film, and somehow the manager had managed to fit two foam easy chairs and a glass-topped coffee table in the corner. At the back there was a long narrow darkroom and a toilet, but there was nowhere to sit and rest. The man preferred it this way. He had become accustomed to the size of the place. He felt no strain as he stood all day in the hot little room while the people came and went with their requests.
A table-top fan rattled to and fro in a corner of the room but its struggle was in vain. The hot, sluggish air refused to be moved. Staff and customers waded through the close atmosphere.
‘I need to pick ’em up by four,’ a young man said. He wore shorts, a baseball cap, but no shirt, as if this were his own house, his unkempt garden. ‘There’s three films – is that a problem?’ His shoulders were fuchsia pink and blistering. His whole body seemed alive with heat, like a child that had fallen into a too-hot bath. He failed to notice that he had pushed in front of an old woman who had been waiting patiently. She had turned to examine the albums and frames as she waited, and the young man had walked to the head of the queue.
‘It can be ready in one hour,’ the man said. ‘But you must wait behind the people.’ He nodded at the old woman. There was a girl standing behind her. The old woman turned to look at
the young man, not wanting to cause a disturbance, but all he said was, ‘Sorry, luv,’ and he moved to the end of the queue.
The people came and went and the man spoke to them, taking their rolls of film, answering the usual questions, the occasional complaint. They worked a shift system: two would serve the customers, while the other three developed the films. Sometimes a person would arrive with a marked photograph and ask whether anything could be done about that. Often there was a way to remove the marks, the scratches, so that the picture appeared new and blemish-free. There was a particular machine that the man liked to use to eradicate these faults. Often this was the only time during the day when he was able to sit.
The old woman presented such a photograph. It was of five women from a different era; the man recognised the old woman among them. Her hair was not white as it was now, but a dense, lustrous black. The other women looked younger still; he wondered whether they were her daughters or her sisters, but he didn’t ask. There was a thick crease running diagonally through the photograph where it had been folded carelessly for years.
‘I don’t know whether you can do anything about this,’ the old woman said. ‘I just thought I’d ask. It’s the only one I have, that. I thought I’d lost it, you see.’ She spoke measuredly and with an effort that seemed to bring tears to her eyes, as if she were facing into a strong wind.
‘Well, I do not know,’ the man began. ‘It is very old. I cannot promise that it will be better, but you must leave it with me – I will see what I can do.’ He said this as if he himself were going to work on the photograph, but it wasn’t his turn to use the computer. It was easy enough, the job, and he knew it, but he had developed this spiel. Most of the staff used it to guard against the possibility of failure, and also to elicit surprise in the customers when they returned. He knew the old woman would be thrilled.
A Life Elsewhere Page 11