It seems that I need to put Smilemime out of my head in order to engage with sleep. Surely I dealt with all his points that were worth answering and quite possibly some that weren't, or did he raise one that I failed to grasp? I suspect he says anything that comes to mind, and he can stay out of mine. That's easier to vow than to achieve, and soon I'm back at my desk.
I don't want to see what the screen has in store. I type gibberish as random as I can manage and furiously click the mouse. The yellowed keys rattle like bones while the mouse emits its plastic chatter, but none of this helps. The screen is no longer featureless. Its sides extend backwards to form the floor and walls and ceiling of a corridor. Though it appears to stretch almost to infinity, I can just distinguish a figure that is waiting at the end. It's approaching, or am I? I would very much prefer it to keep its distance, and the distraction of Mark's voice comes as a relief.
It isn't quite so welcome once I hear his words. 'He's on. He's lit up.' Presumably he too is having a bad dream. At least his dream has rescued me from mine, and I open my eyes. A clown's blurred glowing face is beside me on the pillow.
I gasp rather less than a word and jerk away, backing into Natalie. The next moment the bedside light comes on. That's scarcely reassuring, because we're surrounded by shadowy figures in jesters' hats. I feel like a child who has wakened from a nightmare into worse until I identify them as the shadows of gnomes inside the lamp. As for the clown's face, it was printed on my wrist. I didn't realise that I hadn't washed it off or that it was so luminous. 'I'll go if you like,' I murmur, sitting up. 'I know what it'll be.'
Natalie blinks rapidly to clear her eyes. 'What will it?'
'Just this,' I say, exhibiting my wrist, but now I can't see the imprint. I'm wondering if Mark has sorted out the situation for himself when he breaks his silence with an inarticulate but heartfelt protest. I'm almost out of the room before Natalie says 'Better put something on, Simon. I know you're boys, but you aren't related.'
I grab my towelling robe from the hook on the door and struggle into the inside-out sleeves and knot the cord around my waist. I open Mark's door gradually so as not to startle him awake. The room isn't as dark as it should be; it's illuminated by a dim glow that drains everything of colour. Mark is lying on his side with his face towards the source of the illumination – the blank computer screen. I can't see whether he's asleep, even when I move to shut down the computer. Shouldn't it be displaying a screensaver if it isn't dark? I wonder if he may only recently have finished using it with the sound turned off, a possibility that's preferable to the unappealing notion that someone or something has gone to ground inside the computer. I take hold of the mouse and hear a flurry of bedclothes behind me. 'What are you,' Mark says and leaves it at that, or his drowsiness does.
'You need to switch this off when you go to bed, Mark.'
I face him to say so. When I turn back to the screen it's teeming with icons. I must have touched them off with the mouse. I shut the computer down, leaving the room illuminated by light from the hall. 'Now what were you shouting about?'
'I wasn't, and I did switch off.'
'It sounded like shouting to us. Were you dreaming?'
The charcoal sketch of his face peers out of the gloom. 'Must have been.'
'Was it to do with today? Was it this?'
I bare my wrist, on which the clown's remains have saved up a faint pallid glow. Mark holds up his like a response to a secret sign. It's more clearly defined, in particular the grin. 'Do you think you'd better wash it off?' I suggest.
'No,' Mark protests as he hides it and the rest of him under the blanket.
I pad out of the room and close the doors. I'm reclaiming my half of the quilt when Natalie says 'That was better.'
'I'll keep trying,' I say as she returns the floppy-hatted shadows to the dark. For a while I listen to be sure that Mark is quiet. Without warning it's so silent that I don't know where I am. Where was the desk in my dream? Not in this apartment, now I think about it. Why should it matter? I'm with Natalie, and there's another of her breaths. I'm nearly asleep, that's all, and then I wholly am.
EIGHTEEN - I'M NOT REMISS
It's the time of year. The reduced landscape seems to have been trundling past as repetitively as a screensaver for hours. As the train dawdles north, frost and frozen snow keep pace with a sun like a disc of ice embedded in the colourless sky. They've rendered the fields and small towns rudimentary: pale sketches of themselves, or faded photographs. As though to contradict the spectacle, the train is so overheated that the air tastes like laryngitis. The windows in the doors are the only ones that open, and they won't do so except all the way, sending a winter gale through the carriage. I can't even buy a drink of water; the buffet shut half an hour ago, although it isn't unattended – I'm sure I heard laughter beyond the metal shutter of the counter, but there was no other response however hard I knocked. The water from the cold taps in the toilets is so lukewarm I don't want it in my mouth. I feel trapped by all this, borne helplessly onwards with more than one symptom of fever, but there's no use in pretending not to know why. I'm gripping my mobile in a clammy fist while I put off making the call.
I haven't stored the number. This is such a pathetic excuse that out of rage I almost mistype an enquiry code. Someone in India has me repeat the details while another white field etched with bare black trees is dragged past the window. When a voice composed of samples speaks the information I type it into the memory, and now I've no pretext for delaying. I poke the keys and lift the mobile to my face.
As the phone miles ahead starts to ring, the train loses speed. I could imagine that the sound has snagged the landscape. The trees beside the railway plod to a halt at the precise moment the notes cease, and I feel as if the silenced world is unable to move without a response. There's a wordless hiss, and then my father says 'You've reached Bob and Sandy Lester. Just because we've retired doesn't have to mean we're in. We can't have got to the phone, anyway, so don't leave us wondering. Speak your piece and we'll be in touch.'
The answering machine is newer than my last call. I can only utter my prepared greeting. 'Hello,' I say flatly. I'm echoed at once.
It might almost be an aberration of the machine. 'Hello,' I repeat.
'Hello.'
That's flatter than ever, but then so was mine. 'This is fun, isn't it?' I say to move us on.
'Is this who I think it is?'
'If it's who you'd like it to be.'
'I shouldn't think I have much choice by now. They call that being a father.'
I'm back in my adolescence, when my days with him seemed to consist of verbal skirmishes that he wouldn't abandon until he won. Sometimes I think all this crippled my ability to communicate. Before I can decide on a response he says 'What's the occasion, may I ask?' 'Does there have to be one?'
'Better hadn't be if they don't matter to you.'
'I'm sorry.' That's an overstatement and a simplification, which I resent as bitterly as needing to explain 'I was having some problems at the time.'
'You could always have told us. Are you able now?'
'Losing my job.'
'We weren't looking for a wedding present, Simon. If you'd let us know you were in difficulty we could have paid your fare.'
'I could have managed.'
'Right enough, you could.' Somewhat less sharply he asks 'And what's your situation now?'
'I've sold a film book, maybe several.'
'May we hope there'll be one with our names on it?'
I'm pierced by a sudden unexpected sense of loss. Despite all our confrontations, didn't we grow closer for a while on our weekly days out? Sometimes climbing the fells north of Preston with him felt like an antidote to being indulged by my mother at home. Perhaps inscribing a book to my parents will make up for all my uncommunicative Christmas and birthday and Mother's and Father's Day cards. 'Of course, when it comes out next year,' I say. 'I'm researching it in Preston.'
'Are we to be ho
noured with a visit? Don't put yourself out if it's too much trouble.'
'Let me see what I have to do first.'
'Is it a secret?'
'I'm looking into the career of one of the old Keystone comics. He was on stage as Thackeray Lane.'
At once there's a burst of wild laughter, and the landscape jerks as if it's an image projected not quite steadily on the window. The train subsides, and I realise that a door had opened, releasing the mirth of a television audience, as I hear my mother say 'Who is it, Bob?'
'Have we any fatted calves in the freezer?'
This seems to earn a surge of laughter before she says 'Fatty what again?'
'Calves. Not your legs. No need to show me those. Stop dancing about, Sandra. Calves. Little bulls. The fatted variety.'
'How little?'
'Never mind what size. We haven't really got any. That's the point I'm struggling to make.'
'You're struggling all right, but I'll be blessed if I know why.'
'It used to be expected of the father of the prodigal.'
All this might be a routine they're performing, especially given the waves of hilarity in the background, if it weren't so dogged and increasingly peevish. It seems to thicken the heat, which is already as inert as the frozen landscape. I'm dismayed by how much their age has slowed them down since I was last in touch, unless my lack of contact has. As my skin prickles with feverish guilt my mother says 'Are we talking about Simon?'
Applause almost blots out my father's weary reply. 'That's who it is.'
'He's on the phone?' my mother cries, and the whitened fields begin to ooze backwards like an immense river in the first stages of a thaw. 'Are you trying not to let me speak to him? Give it here or it's us that won't be speaking.'
I hear blurred voices beyond an amplified commotion that suggests she has grabbed the receiver, and then she says 'Simon? Are you there?'
'I haven't gone anywhere.'
'I wish you were here. You sound as if you are.'
'That's technology for you.'
'I believe it's more than that. I believe it's you wanting to be. Let's all forget our differences, whatever they were. Are you coming for Christmas? Will you be on your own?'
I was last year. I pretended not to have the day off from the petrol station, but I could tell that even Natalie didn't think the invitation her parents sent through her to celebrate with them was too sincere. 'I'm with someone,' I say.
'Bring her, of course. That's if she's a she. Bring them whichever way.' As trees race past the window my mother says 'So are you coming to us now?'
I'm dismayed by the notion that she has elided the weeks before Christmas. 'I was saying it rather depends how my work goes. I don't want to be away from my desk too long.'
'Do your best to see us, Simon. Nobody's getting any younger.'
'I will.'
'I'll let you get back to your work, then. It was lovely to hear your voice. Bring the rest of you as soon as you can.'
A final wave of merriment is cut off before it crests, and then the only sound is the muffled monotonous conversation of the wheels with the tracks. Her assumption that I'm working at this moment makes me feel I ought to be. I re-call the enquiries line and ask for the number of the library in Preston. The switchboard operator at the library sounds more remote than my parents did, and the reference librarian seems even more distant. I feel compelled to raise my voice halfway through saying 'Do I just need to ask at the counter for the Preston Chronicle?'
'If you let us know which issues we can have them waiting.'
'I'd like to look at 1913. Maybe 1912 as well. I should be there in an hour or so.'
'Could you hold on?' For no reason that I can imagine, she sounds doubtful. The clacking of a keyboard overtakes the rhythm of the wheels, and then her voice returns. 'You must be thinking of a different newspaper.'
'I'm not, I promise you. Who says I am?'
'The computer,' she says, and I'm preparing to argue with it when she robs me of words. 'It wasn't published in the last century at all.'
NINETEEN - SENIORS
I have to walk around the Harris building twice before I find the way in. The pillared Grecian building houses the museum and library and art gallery, and they're reconstructing it on behalf of the disabled. Contractors have walled off the massive steps that lead up to the main entrance. At first I miss a back door so rudimentary that it resembles an unpainted portion of a stage set. It leads into a lending library, where I'm confronted by shelves of books in Urdu. A computer printout on a door around the corner of the L-shaped room directs me into a circular vestibule. In the middle of the marble floor a giant figure is wrapped so thoroughly in opaque plastic that it's impossible to guess what the statue depicts. Somewhere behind the scenes, hammering and stony clanks suggest that another one is being sculpted. I climb one of a pair of marble staircases past a door marked THIS DOOR IS NOT TO BE USED to a circular balcony, which is a maze of plastic barriers and hulking chipboard pillars twice my height. While several of the pillars bear computer printouts saying THIS WAY, some of these appear to be or to have become jokes. I dodge around the obstacles into the reference library, where a tall young woman with black curls dusted by the renovation is standing behind the counter. 'You've got some newspapers for me,' I tell her.
'You're Mr Who again?'
'Lester. I spoke to you before, I think.'
'Not to me.' She begins to sort through items hidden by the counter. 'Local papers from 1912 and 1913? She's found you a couple.'
'Is one of them the Chronicle?'
'I thought she told you it hadn't been published for decades by then.'
How could I have misread or misremembered the name of the paper I bought at the fair? There seems to be no other explanation, and perhaps it will prove to be one of the newspapers on microfilm. I ask to look at 1913 first, and the librarian ushers me to a microfilm reader. As the slaty screen grows twilit she inserts the spool. 'Just give us a shout when you want the next one,' she murmurs. 'Well, not a shout, obviously.'
'I'll gesture if you like.'
I thought that was a little wittier than the collapse of her smile implies. 'I'll come and whisper,' I try undertaking, but she heads even more speedily for the counter. I wind the front page of the New Year's Day edition of the Preston Gazette onto the monitor. At once there's a dismayed cry, and the screen turns blank.
'It's crashed.' That was the cry, and for a moment I imagine that I'm staring at a dead computer. The room has grown darker than the overcast afternoon, and everyone who was working at a monitor is looking towards the counter. Somewhere large and stony, men and their echoes are chortling. 'I'll see what's happened. I don't think it's anything to laugh at,' the tall librarian says and hurries out of the room.
I seem to hear her footsteps multiply as they recede around the balcony. I could imagine that several versions of her are following various routes. By the time she returns, more than one customer has left the reading room. 'We're sorry, everyone,' she says. 'They must have drilled through something. We don't know how long they'll take to fix it.'
This drives out all the remaining members of the public except me. I haven't travelled half the day to give up so easily. I peer at the screen, which is playing a game of appearing to glimmer while it darkens further, until the librarian says 'I'm afraid we have to ask you to leave.'
'You surely aren't blaming me for anything.'
'It's a health and safety issue,' she says and removes the microfilm.
The rest of the building feels emptied even of laughter, unless that is biding its time. As I dodge around the chipboard pillars I have an unwelcome sense that someone may be hiding silently behind at least one of them. I hurry downstairs with my echoes, which are leaving me uncertain whether I can hear muffled chuckles, even when I press my ear against the door that isn't to be used. In the vestibule I pace around the figure shrouded in plastic, but of course nobody as tall is hiding behind it – nothing is. I desist
when I notice that a man in overalls surely too large for efficiency is watching me from the balcony. His face must be pale with dust from the reconstruction, an effect that emphasises the redness of his wide amused mouth. I gaze at him for some seconds, which feel like a contest to discover who will move first, and then I head for daylight.
I blink and shiver as I step out beneath the grey wadded sky. The route to the station leads past an open market beneath a cast-iron roof. I'm not about to be tempted to search the tables and give myself no time to go home. All along the street beyond the market the stores are tricked out for Christmas, and some are emitting jolly songs. The merry competition merges into whiter noise as I follow one of the old side streets down towards Winckley Square.
Each side of the street is a rank of tall brown houses pressed together. Some of the rotund front windows are strung with coloured bulbs, others are occupied by trees that flare like warnings that the night is over the unseen horizon. In the cross-street where I used to live, two incarnations of Father Christmas squat on opposite roofs to confront each other with unyielding good humour. My parents' window sports a lone festoon so dusty that the bulbs seem in danger of sputtering out every time they light up. The edge of a step crumbles under my heel as I climb to the door, which is so faded it can hardly be called black, and poke the large round rusty bellpush.
I can't remember how the bell sounds, and I don't hear it. Nevertheless my father calls 'Someone's here' and opens the door at once. He's wearing an ancient pale-blue cardigan, of which the outsize wooden buttons are the only aspects to have kept their shape, and brown corduroy trousers with frayed muddy cuffs. Both garments have some trouble containing his stomach. His face is well on the way to round, and I wonder if its heaviness makes it hard to operate, since it bears no expression and produces none. Is it possible that he doesn't recognise me, or would he prefer not to? He appears to be so much more interested in the street behind me that I hardly feel I'm there. I'm opening my mouth in case that helps me think of a remark when he says 'Isn't someone with you?'
The Grin of the Dark Page 13