Einstein
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
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Copyright
Einstein
Miles Gibson
For Susan. Thank you.
‘De god wat made shark must be one dam Ingin’
Herman Melville
1.
Charlie Nelson was watching TV when the stranger appeared on the roof. It was a cold night in late September and the streets were shining with rain. All day the wind had roared through the dirty city, snatching at rags and hamburger wrappers, newspapers, beer cans, plastic bottles, sucking them into the shimmering sky where they sailed like flocks of fabulous birds. Handbills swarmed over Piccadilly. A flight of empty cardboard boxes turned and tumbled over the river. After the wind came the rain, exploding from clouds the colour of gravy, drowning the city in darkness.
Charlie was slumped in his favourite armchair watching a woman in a cocktail dress flirting with a dancing pig. The pig wore spats and a jaunty topper. They were singing in praise of a microwave dinner. They were singing, laughing, dancing in circles. This tasty microwave miracle was an Instant Gourmet™ Pork Surprise. It would certainly be a surprise for the pig in the jaunty topper. Charlie yawned. It was hot and crowded in the room. The walls were loaded with books and pictures, pencil sketches, watercolours in cheap gilt frames. Beneath the window a large pine chest supported trays of dusty houseplants, pots of exhausted cactuses, twists of ivy, a faded myrtle in a china bowl.
Beside Charlie’s chair a bag of peanuts spilled on a varnished coffee table. Beneath the table an old dog snuffled and moaned in a troubled sleep. His whiskers twitched and he paddled his paws. The dog was called Einstein. He must have been dreaming of Instant Gourmet™ microwave dinners.
Charlie didn’t know that a stranger had landed on the roof. In a few hours the intruder would be stepping through the shower curtains like the Jolly Green Giant and Charlie would be screaming and his entire life would he rushing before his eyes. But now he was eating salted peanuts and watching a woman dance with a pig while Einstein snored and the rain came hissing against the window.
2.
At midnight Einstein woke up and cracked his head against the table, spilling peanuts over the floor.
‘It’s raining,’ Charlie said, as he watched the dog trot towards the door. ‘Can’t you wait until morning?’
Einstein grinned and scratched the carpet. He looked like a child’s drawing of a dog: a square body and a cone for a head, his tail a dash and his nose a squiggle. His coat was white, his ears and feet black, one eye was green and one eye was yellow. He wore the cordial expression of the violently insane. He was a small mongrel with a loaded bladder.
‘You’ve got to stop drinking at night,’ Charlie grumbled as he struggled into his overcoat.
It was cold in the passage. The walls gave out a damp, sour smell. Above their head a small bulb flickered in a chipped glass shade. He locked the apartment and followed the dog down six flights of stairs to the windswept street.
At the entrance to the building they paused, breathless, bracing themselves against the freezing darkness. ‘You’ve got three minutes,’ Charlie shivered. ‘Three minutes or you stay here till morning.’
Einstein growled, hesitated for a moment, and then he was running forward, his ears flying like flags, the rain on his back like a saddle of sequins. He scampered to the corner of the street and cocked his leg against a sack of rubbish.
Charlie huddled miserably in the doorway. And then he spotted the old man. He was dressed in nothing but pyjamas and a pair of swollen slippers. The rain sprayed from his face. Water spurted from his sleeves. He was standing alone in the middle of the street, his head thrown back and his mad eyes fixed on the rooftops. He looked wild. He looked crazy. He looked like he’d just seen a flying saucer. He was smiling, smiling, and his face was shining with a bright unholy light.
‘Did you see it?’ he shouted, when he caught sight of Charlie. He staggered forward, stopped and turned his face to the sky.
‘What happened?’ Charlie said, from the safety of the doorway. He peered up and down the empty street. There was nothing but rain and the rumble of drains.
‘There!’ the old man shrieked. ‘There!’ He raised his fist and stabbed with a bony finger at heaven. He began to laugh.
Charlie squinted into the sky, hidden by a curtain of sodium light. He shook his head and shrugged. What? What had happened? But the old man wouldn’t wait for him. He was splashing away down the street, shouting and laughing into the rain.
Charlie caught Einstein, took him back to the safety of the apartment and dropped him into his basket. It was twenty minutes past midnight. The dog sneezed and grinned.
‘Sleep!’ Charlie said.
Einstein shook himself and turned three circles before he settled down into the basket. Steam curled from the top of his head. His wet coat leaked a comforting stink.
When the little dog had made himself comfortable, Charlie snapped out the light, pulled off his shoes and shuffled into his bedroom The room was warm and dark and familiar. There was an oak wardrobe against one wall, a chest of drawers and a small chair. An alarm clock chattered under the chair. The mattress farted when he climbed into bed. He lay beneath the blankets and blinked at the ceiling, waiting for sleep to press down on him.
At two o’clock in the morning he started to dream. He dreamed he’d been carried away from the room and was shrinking into the sunlit past. He dreamed he was back with his mother and father, in a house behind a privet hedge. He was three or four years old, sitting on the carpet in the shadow of his mother’s skirt. His arms were wrapped around her knees and his head was buried in her petticoats. He could hear his father in the room and smell the barber’s cologne as it wafted from his clothes. His father was shouting and clacking his dentures.
Charlie groaned and rolled his head in the pillow.
3.
The dog grunted and cocked his ears. It was three o’clock, cold in the room and rain still hissing against the window. He sat up in his basket and shivered. Something had shaken him from his sleep, teased his whiskers and dragged its fingernails down his spine.
He leaned forward, hung his head from the broken edge of the basket and watched the floor for the scampering shadows of mice and beetles. Nothing moved. He snuffled suspiciously at the air. Nothing. For some time he sat in his basket per
plexed, swinging his head from side to side, trawling the darkness with his nose.
And then, through the comforting household smells, came a strange and unfamiliar odour. It was the most sublime smell of wet earth, warm goat leather, soft cow dung, sweating horses, a rich and pungent flavour that seemed to gather around him like smoke. He slobbered and slapped his snout with his tongue. He was hypnotised with delight.
He scrambled from his basket, padded quickly across the room and followed his nose into the hall. The trail evaporated. He was left with nothing but the stale smell of carpet. He sat down, astonished, and looked around him. Released so abruptly from his trance the dog felt confused and frightened. He listened to the distant rain, the creak of the furniture, the tapping of his own heart and the trumpeting of Charlie’s breath as it penetrated the bedroom door.
The thought of Charlie gave him courage. The stump of his tail began to quiver. He sprang to his feet and conducted a jaunty patrol of the hall, snapping and growling at ghosts. There was nothing here to threaten him but the cooling scent of his own dreams.
And then, very gently, a doorknob turned and the bathroom door swung open. Einstein snarled and sprang back in surprise. A shaft of sunlight spilled into the hall like the memory of some distant summer. It was warm and fragrant and sparkled with pollen. The light carried with it a concentration of tantalising odours, grain sacks, warm hay, salt air and cedar, the sprayed scent of the wild fox, the soiled sand of the rabbit hole.
Einstein crouched against the floor. But now he was trembling with pleasure. He dipped his snout into the light and sucked at the smells that tormented him. He mewed. He whimpered. He crawled on his belly into the source of the miracle.
And the door clicked shut behind him.
4.
Charlie woke up in a sweat.
The blanket was wrapped around his neck and his face was stuffed in the pillow. He struggled to stretch out his arms like a man drowning in glue, twisted and turned until the pillow fell to the floor and his head flopped down against the mattress.
He opened his eyes, no longer asleep and not yet awake, trying to make sense of his surroundings. He rubbed his face and yawned. His tongue felt swollen and his throat burned. He needed a glass of water.
He gathered the blanket from the bed and threw it around himself like a shawl. It was past five o’clock and the rain had dwindled into a drizzle. He groped his way across the room and lurched towards the kitchen trailing the blanket behind him.
The kitchen was cold. A blind at the narrow window concealed a view of a dirty brick wall. Beneath the window stood a small sink with a cluttered draining board. The room was filled by a stove, a fridge, a set of painted chipboard cupboards and a table surrounded by scuffed wooden chairs. The table still bore the remains of breakfast. The fridge groaned and shivered, its shelves arthritic with ice. Beyond the window the gutters were dripping.
Charlie switched on the light and screwed up his eyes against the glare. When he reached the sink he rummaged on the draining board for a cup, filling it, drinking greedily, gasping for breath. Oh, that was good. The cold water hurt his teeth and burned against the back of his throat.
He was wiping his chin with the back of his hand when he paused, shivered and frowned at the window. He had a strange sensation that something, somewhere, was watching him. He glanced back towards the door, half-expecting to find Einstein peeping at him with a stupid grin on his face. But the doorway was empty. He stared down at his feet, prepared for bogeymen grabbing his ankles. So many bogeymen in his childhood, hiding in cupboards and laundry baskets, waiting to make their lunge at him. Monsters mostly disguised as shadows. But the floor was bare.
And then he saw them!
As he turned to retrace his steps he glanced across the room and saw the ghosts of his mother and father sitting together at the table, holding hands and staring at him with sad, exhausted eyes.
His mother was wearing the same, old-fashioned summer frock printed with tiny posies of flowers. Her hair was caked with dust and her petticoats were torn. One of her shoes was missing.
His father was wearing a Sunday suit, a starched shirt and a black silk tie. The celluloid collar had broken loose and the tie was cutting his neck. He looked stiff and uncomfortable, sitting there trying to flex his feet in a heavy pair of brogues, as if he’d been called from his barber’s shop and forced to dress up for the haunting in someone else’s clothes. He gave off the scent of brilliantine, tobacco and stale cologne.
‘Hello, Charlie,’ the barber said. ‘Fancy finding you here tonight.’ He didn’t sound surprised.
Charlie felt his legs start to buckle and he clutched at the draining board for support. This wasn't happening. It couldn’t be true. He clenched his jaw and grinned in horror. He opened his mouth to scream but nothing ballooned from his throat.
‘He looks thin,’ his mother said, shaking her dusty head. She sighed, raised one hand and absently touched her shoulder straps, as if crossing herself in private devotion.
‘He looks fine,’ the barber said softly. His eyes were red and rheumy. A dewdrop hung from the tip of his nose.
‘You didn’t look after him.’
‘I gave him everything!’ the barber said indignantly.
‘He hasn’t been eating properly,’ his mother insisted.
‘Eating? Hah! When I was alive he wouldn’t stop eating, It wasn’t natural the way he put away his food,’ his father said. ‘He never looked healthy. He was never a picture of health.’
‘He would never take enough fresh air,’ his mother sighed.
‘A head full of high-falutin’ notions,’ his father snorted. ‘That was his trouble.’
‘Look at the state of the kitchen,’ his mother said, shaking her head as she stared around the room.
‘What’s wrong with it?’ his father said, looking puzzled.
‘It’s filthy!’ his mother complained. ‘He should have been married. Why isn’t he married? He needs a wife to look after him.’
Her voice sounded very distant and faint, no more than a whisper in Charlie’s ear. He stared down at her naked foot and saw the bracelet of bruises where a child’s hand had clutched so desperately at her ankle. She was so much younger than he remembered.
‘Is this a dream?’ he whispered. He was pressed against the wall. His legs were shaking. The room was spinning around him.
‘Yes,’ the barber said softly. ‘Yes, son, it’ s only a dream.’
‘Go back to bed,’ his mother said. ‘You’ll catch cold.’
Charlie nodded and heard his teeth chatter. He had to sleepwalk as far as the bed and dream his way back to safety. He was dreaming. He had to wake up in the sunlit world. He was out of the kitchen now and lurching across the narrow hall. He had often walked in his sleep as a child, crawling from the warmth of his mother’s bed with his hair in spikes and his eyes closed, stumbling into the wardrobe door, waking suddenly from the dream, shouting at himself in the moonlit mirrors. And his mother had gathered him into her arms and settled him back to rest.
He stopped and flinched as if something had smacked his face. He jerked back his head. The blanket slipped from his shoulders and fell in folds around his feet. He stood naked, trembling, his mouth open and his eyes blinking in terror. There was uproar in the bedroom!
The bulb in the ceiling was flashing and swinging wildly on its flex. The alarm clock rang as it skittered in circles under the chair. Charlie ran forward. Beneath the swirling light he saw the ghost of his father standing beside the ruined bed. The old man was standing with his arms outstretched and his Sunday suit on fire. Smoke rolled from his collar and sleeves and poured through the cracks in his blazing shoes. Flames filled his ears and shot from his melting fingertips. The silk tie shrank to a necklace of sparks. His shirt was crumbling to cinders.
As Charlie watched, the bonfire turned to his son and his mouth snapped open in a smouldering grin. His tongue was a lick of yellow flame. Black smoke squirted between his
teeth. ‘Save me, Charlie!’ he bellowed. ‘Save me!’ He staggered forward. scorching footprints into the carpet.
Charlie screamed.
5.
He ran from the room, trapped his toes in the tangled blanket and sent himself sprawling over the carpet. He rolled sideways, struck his elbow against the wall, shouted, stood up, fell down, scuttled away on his hands and knees and reached the safety of the bathroom.
He closed the door by falling on it and managed to turn the key in the lock. Then he pressed his face against the door and listened, stupid with fright, for sounds of the burning barber. He could hear nothing but the murmur of walls, a ticking floorboard, the soft thumping of his veins, the whispering silence. He turned on the light and stared at himself in the mirror. The bathroom was small and spartan: a porcelain basin, a cupboard, the curtains drawn against the shower. The face in the mirror was white, the mouth slack with shock and exposing the teeth, the eyes shrunk into their sockets. The hair stood out from the skull like tufts of dirty wet wool.
Charlie gripped the edge of the basin and studied his face for a long time, frowning and shaking his head. What was wrong with him? Is this what it meant to be insane? Did your dreams slither out through your ears like worms? Did you lose your way in a maze filled with ghosts?
He found a comb and pulled it slowly through his hair. The nightmare began to evaporate. He was bruised and cold and exhausted. He raised a hand to his face and tried to control the trembling fingers. In a few moments he would unlock the door, feeling foolish and tiptoe back to bed. The room would be empty, his ghosts transmogrified into shadows. He would collect his blanket and pillow and settle back to sleep. It was late. In a couple of hours Einstein would come to disturb him, scratching, demanding breakfast.
He shivered and managed to smile at the mirror.
The shower curtains blew apart and the bathrooms seemed to explode. Charlie was hit by a great gust of air that threw him back against the wall. A cake of soap struck him hard in the chest. A toothbrush shot past his face and stuck like a dagger in the door. The cupboard collapsed, a bottle of mouthwash started to boil, aspirins were bouncing like hailstones. Charlie moaned and pulled himself into a ball, closed his eyes and covered his head with his hands. Above him the lightbulb melted and sagged into strings of shining sugar.
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