The river is the river

by Buckley, Jonathan;

  From the windows of this room, at the front of the building’s top storey, the entirety of the market place was visible: four rows of stalls, arranged as two lines, back to back, with a cobbled avenue separating the two inward-facing rows. Striped tarpaulins, red and white, covered the stalls, and at one end stood the fountain, from which two stone horses arose, high above the pavement: the sentinels of the street. If you awoke late, you would hear the murmur of the shoppers below, a sound as easeful as a breeze through leaves. A storm one night made the tarpaulins snap and crack; they flailed in the wind, and at last flew away. The bedroom door trembled against its frame with the thunderclaps. Rainwater falling from a broken gutter struck the pavement with a noise like turnstiles. A fire engine rushed through the rain, towards Top Church, raising huge wings of water from the road. The sound of the siren was always thrilling; it was the moment of passing that you so enjoyed, the voluptuous instant of mournful decline. In the morning, after the storm, the weathervane of Top Church dangled from the spire, like an almost severed head.

  The bedroom had two doors, one of which opened onto a windowless storage space. Boxes and suitcases were stacked in here, on three sides. A navy blue trunk with wooden corners formed the base of one stack. You would close the door of the little room, then prise open the trunk and climb in. It was difficult to raise the lid, with the boxes piled on top, but the effort was rewarded. Inside, it was as dark as the deepest corner of a mine, and nothing but your breathing could be heard.

  A window at the top of the uppermost flight of stairs opened onto a light well, which was traversed by a washing line. In the coldest days of winter, shirts taken off this line were as stiff as balsa, and furred with frost: I see them lined up along the corridor, at an angle to the wall – a cloche of rigid clothes. The frozen shirts were like the torsos of mummified corpses, raised from frozen earth; you would crack the arms one by one.

  At the bottom of the main staircase, opposite the triangular space below the stairs, a wide window gave a view of a complicated landscape of flat roofs, chimneys, vents and low walls. After rain, large shallow puddles remained on the roofs for days – cloud shapes, with real clouds mirrored in them. A pale russet stain spread out from a spool of wire that lay beside a rotting ladder. Three or four doors, in cabin-like structures, opened onto the roofs, but nobody was ever seen to emerge from them. There were no gaps between the buildings, so it would have been possible to walk for a long way across this zinc-coloured plain. The window, however, could not be opened.

  A thin carpet covered the floor of the hallway, and the boards underneath were loose in places, and uneven, so a ball or marble would not run straight along it. There was one spot, an inch from the wall, midway along, where a board was loose, so the floor would make a tiny scream, like a mouse in a trap, when lightly trodden. Near this spot, above the skirting board, a box of thick black plastic was attached. It was the size of a large book, and the plastic had the sheen of ebony. By pressing an ear against it, you could hear, faintly, the sound – but rarely the words – of conversations on the telephone line of the shop below.

  Daylight came into the dining room through a single window, which opened onto the light well, which was deep and narrow, so nothing of the sky could be seen from the dining table. Even in the middle of the year it was sometimes necessary to use the electric light that hung from the centre of the ceiling; the lampshade was a shallow bowl of opaque white glass, with a large pale yellow stain in it, like the body of a jellyfish. The only old piece of furniture was in this room: a sideboard of dark wood, surmounted by a clouded oval mirror and a cornice that was supported by four columns carved into barleystick spirals. Below the drawers, two doors closed a compartment in which were stacked copies of the Reader’s Digest, some science fiction novels, an atlas, and a medical book in which there were pictures of a pregnant woman, naked but for her knickers, with nipples as big as biscuits and dark as liquorice.

  In the centre of the living room stood a grass-green settee. The fabric was nylon, and the pattern of the fabric was formed by narrow cables laid closely together in diagonal lines. On the day you came back from the opticians with your first pair of glasses you came into the room and saw the settee in bright sunlight. From the distance of the doorway you could discern the strands of which each cable was composed; coming closer, you saw the dust that lay in the twists of the material, like grains of sand amid ribbons of seaweed. You cried at this astonishing sight.

  The fireplace was clad with thick ceramic tiles, the colour of caramel and plain chocolate, in a chequerboard array. Over the mouth of the fireplace was placed a metal mesh fireguard. Now, as I write these words, the sensation of touching my tongue to the metal is renewed, and saliva springs in my mouth. It is akin to the sensation created by putting one’s tongue across the terminals of a nine-volt battery. Later, an electric heater was installed in the fireplace. Above the twin elements, a pile of fake coals – a single piece of fibreglass – lay in front of an undulating backboard of polished metal. Two light bulbs burned beneath the coals. Perforated parasols of thin metal were pivoted on pins above the bulbs and turned in the heat that they generated, creating on the backboard an approximately flame-like effect, which invited contemplation, despite the clumsiness of the artifice.

  The television – an object as bulky as a jukebox – had a screen that was convex and grey-green, and little larger than a closed magazine. A thick casing of something like cardboard covered the back of it, pierced with many slits. Peering through these slits, you could see valves glowing faintly above the plateaus and canyons of circuitry, like a city of the future at night.

  A small platform, perhaps three feet high, was enclosed by the bay window of the living room. On days of warm sunlight, you would sit on this platform to read, on a seat of cushions. Net curtains covered the windows, and in hot weather these curtains held a perfume that was sweet and musky. For the summer carnival the windows were opened so that you could dangle your legs above the parade of pirates, Aztecs, cowboys and Indians, as they followed the brass band along the high street. One year, an Aztec girl stopped below the window and smiled up at you; she was as lovely as an actress. For weeks afterwards you looked at every girl you passed in the street, hoping that she would be the Aztec girl. You never saw her, except by thinking of her, which you did every day, for a long time, until she began to blur, as if her features were being worn away by your thinking, like the face on an old coin.

  In the bathroom there was a small wall-mounted heater, which warmed only the air directly below it. The flooring, of synthetic linoleum, was cold for most of the year, but beside the bath a rectangular rug was placed, on which was shown a lion, standing in a jungle clearing, below a sky that was as red as tomato ketchup. The rug had been bought from a man who came to the shop one day, a man from India. It had an underlay of thick orange foam, which disintegrated over the years, releasing granular pieces of rubber, like cod’s roe. A cabinet stood behind the door, and in the lowest compartment of this cabinet was kept a milk bottle into which every powder in your chemistry set had been poured, with water, in the hope of creating a spectacular effusion, like one of Dr Frankenstein’s concoctions. The brew had proved to be inert. The bottle remained in the cabinet for months, with an inch-thick stratum of sludge, catfish-brown, at the base.

  A curtain of red and white chequered cloth, hung from a wire, covered the space below the kitchen sink, and in this space, in a plastic bucket, could be found a stiff yellow stick of leather which, when dropped into water, performed a transformation that always fascinated. You would fill the bucket with warm water and let the stick slide into it, as though releasing a creature that rightfully belonged there. You scooped it out on the back of a hand, for the feeling of the delectably repulsive adhesion, like the belly of a huge warm slug.

  Opposite the door that connected the kitchen to the hallway another door opened onto a staircase, which turned sharply to the right, at the top. At this turn, a narrow ledge was oc
cupied, for many years, by two objects of unknown origin: a Toby jug, with a face expressive of gleeful malice; and an elephant of hard black wood, four or five inches tall, which had a single tusk of fake ivory and a circular cavity where the missing tusk would have gone. At the foot of the staircase, three steps turned to the left, to the door that opened into the back yard, and three turned to the right, to the door that opened into the stock room of the shop. The last three steps on each side were steep and narrow. One night you were carried down the stairs and manoeuvred with care around the angle, into the arms of a man who came forward from the bright open door of an ambulance. I remember the oxygen mask: gelid, cold, the colour of dishwater.

  The front office of the shop was furnished with a table and four chairs. On the table was an ashtray, in which cigarettes were left burning when a customer came into the shop. Sometimes you would lift the cigarette to sample it, putting it to your mouth very lightly, so as not to smudge the fine imprint of the woman’s lips. The ashtray was made of glass, and within its base was encased a passenger plane, with a bulbous fuselage and two propellers. The wings were as slim as razor blades, and you would angle the ashtray close to your eyes, to marvel at how the plane came to be there, like a bizarre insect inside a colourless amber.

  A second office, at the opposite end of the stock room, was where the wallpaper was trimmed. The trimming machine had a treadle to control its speed, and two circular blades that could remove a finger in an instant, you were told. The room was unheated and had a single small window, which had bars like a prison cell’s. In the days preceding November 5, the guy for the bonfire was kept here. Once, at night, you visited him, in his moonlit dungeon. His limbs and torso were stuffed with offcuts of wallpaper, so he crackled when embraced, and his face was a mask made of card that had the texture and smell of an egg carton. The walls of this office were whitewashed and the plaster had blistered in many places; the lightest tap would shatter it, exposing liver-coloured brick.

  The outside toilet was used for storing the waste cardboard from all the shops that backed into the yard. The boxes were broken down and piled horizontally. The stack resembled a segment of rock, with dozens of thin strata. A smell of dampness and rot came out of it when the door was opened. A latch with a spoon-shaped and rusty thumb-pad kept the door closed. When you released it, sometimes, a scurrying would start. Once, after the cardboard had been pulled out for burning, two dead mice, pink and hairless, were found on the concrete floor; they looked like boiled sweets, gone soft with age.

  For November 5, the bonfire was built in a corner of the yard that had high walls on three sides. When the fire was in full spate, giant shadows moved across the bricks, and the walls glowed from top to bottom. The shadows made you think of Shadrach, Meschach and Abednego in the fiery furnace. In the morning, tiny wisps of smoke still seeped from the crevices in the silken charcoal that covered the remnants of timber.

  One Sunday, after a night of snowfall, the door to the yard could not be opened: the wind had created a drift that came to the height of your shoulders. On one side of the yard, against the wall, the snow was so deep that a burrow could be dug in it. You excavated a chamber inside the snow and sat there for a long time, under a glowing white roof, telling yourself that you must be careful not to fall asleep, because if you fell asleep in the snow you would die. But dying in the snow, you also knew, was the most peaceful of deaths.

  One of the walls of the yard had been blackened by the smoke of bonfires and some of its bricks had crumbled, creating holds for hands and feet. The top of the wall turned out to be the parapet of a wide flat roof; from here, unobserved, you could observe the comings and goings in the yard. In the middle of the roof rose a construction like a small tent of rusted metal, but in fact it was glass, coated with oily soot. With a finger you scoured a hole in the soot, and what you saw through this hole was a workshop, in which a man wearing a helmet as heavy as a medieval knight’s, and gloves that could have been used in battle, was holding a long thin rod that ended in a point of white flame. The man moved the flame slowly over a large plate of steel, which burned and reddened where the flame touched it. It was like an old story, in which a boy discovers a crack in the earth, and a forge hidden deep within it.

  A short tunnel, square in cross-section, connected the yard to the street, and above this tunnel ran two storeys of flats, reached by iron stairs. The huge vats of a Chinese restaurant stood below one flight of steps, and sometimes the lid was removed from them, and you could look down into the yellow water that was seething inside. Underneath these steps hung buds of dusty grease, all of the same size and shape – a hemisphere, extended slightly at its lowest point by gravity.

  Emerging from the tunnel on a Sunday morning, you looked to your right, where the road rose slightly towards the high street, then to the left, where it descended at the same small gradient, past the police station and on to the public gardens. A cat strutted across the road, and paused for a few seconds in the middle, to stare at you. In the sunlight, the tarmac was as pale as sand. You stood and gazed down the road. The day was warm and clear. When the cat was gone, there was not another living thing to be seen on the heavenly street, for a full minute or more.

  The tall folding doors of the fire station were blood-coloured, and looked perpetually wet. A square window of four small square panes was set into each door, and the glass in every door was as clean as tap water. Inside stood the mighty vehicles, parked always in the same positions, to the inch. The bodywork was as slick as nail polish, without blemish. Every door of the fire engines was open, all of them at an angle of forty-five degrees. The tyres, deeply incised, gleamed like fresh tar, and every tyre had a small bulge in its inside and outside wall, of identical size and curvature. Underneath each engine, placed midway between the front wheels, lay a shallow steel tray, in which might be seen a tiny pool of oil, the black blood of the machine. Everything was readied: the tightly wound hoses, with nozzles that shone like trophies; the silver-bladed axes; the helmets, arrayed in perfect and unchanging order. The aura of the fire station was like the aura of an empty church.

  Opposite the fire station was the barber’s shop. There, waiting, you watched the operation of shaving: the swaddling of towels, which were wound around the neck and jaw as thickly as a winter scarf, emitting a thin steam; then the quick unwinding of the towels and the painting of the skin with lathered soap. Sometimes, where the blade had wiped a track through the lather, a bud of blood would appear and a small white stick, of a radiant and crystalline whiteness, like the marble of a gravestone in rain, would be touched to the wound. The stick caused a sting, you could see, but the sting seemed to be refreshing, as the tartness of lemon juice is refreshing, and immediately the skin was healed.

  The fountain in the high street had two large granite bowls at ground level, at the side, from which horses and cattle would once have drunk, and two smaller bowls, on pedestals, at the front and back, which would have held water for the market traders. There was no longer any water. Above each of the smaller bowls there was a lion’s head, with a dry spout inside its mouth. Water for the animals would have come from the mouths of two large white stone dolphins, which were stuck on the sides of the fountain’s main arch, head down, like squirrels descending a tree trunk. The arch was made of the same white stone, and was covered with carvings – of angels, sea shells and swags of fruit. Above each dolphin, a half-horse pressed its front hooves to the parapet, as if clambering out of the monument. Inside the arch, in niches, stood statues that could not be properly seen from the street, and for that reason had an air of secret meaning. And what was the significance of the two figures that stood at the summit? Who were they? You imagined the fountain to be ancient. It was in the nature of ancient monuments to be massive and incomprehensible and no longer useful.

  In the centre of the high street, two department stores stood side by side. In one the floor was shiny, like the floor of a hospital, and a smell of cold meat was everywhere.
In the other, the floor was made of dark wooden tiles that clacked when you stepped on them; at the back, the town’s first escalator took you down to where the toys were. It was here that you bought a racing car of so gorgeous a blue that you never played with it, for fear of damage. Many years later, in a museum, you at last saw an object of the same hue and lustre: a Byzantine angel, of vitreous enamel.

  At the rear of the department stores, a factory was being demolished. A bulldozer was parked on a mound of bricks, its blade raised to the sky in a gesture of threat. Swung from the gantry of a crane, a gigantic ball went into the one high wall that remained upright. When the ball struck, the bricks curved inward to take it, as if making a catch, then everything came down with the noise of a breaking wave. Dust smoke flew up from the rubble and when the smoke had fallen back it was surprising that so small a pile of rubble should have been created. Behind the pile a door was still standing; a grey overall hung from a peg. It was unsettling, the sight of this overall; it suggested to you that the factory had been demolished before it was ready.

  When the factory had been removed a new car park was laid out. It was a small shallow valley of tarmac, and at the top of the far bank, for many weeks, there was the wreck of a car that had been set on fire. Its bodywork was scorched all over, and only in three or four places could it be seen that it had once been green. The bonnet was ajar and could not be closed. The engine had gone, as had the wheels. Inside, the seats were naked wire and the steering wheel was a hoop of bare metal. Something plastic, in the glove compartment, had melted and was stuck in the cavity, like a large black barnacle. On the floor lay hundreds of little cubes of glass, which you would grind with your feet as you drove. When the car was taken away, it left a print of its chassis on the tarmac, which never disappeared completely.