by Rosie Chard
“Yes. I’m going to digitise them.”
JACK counted forty-three poppies in all. The wearers seemed oblivious to the cardboard flowers planted in their buttonholes and merely turned the pages of their newspapers or gazed at the Tube maps lining the walls as if they were seeing them for the first time. But to Jack the flowers shouted blood red, to remember. You must remember.
He had chosen his clothes carefully that morning. First the shirt – white, ironed crisp to the touch – then black jeans, brown shoes (the only proper footwear he owned) and a jacket that he’d wiped with a damp cloth. He thought about the hours ahead of him as he poked his finger into his empty buttonhole. He thought about the place to which he was going.
Eavesdropping on the Tube was dense and intense, so many people squashed together under the ground, so much noise, all rattles and bumps, but recently he’d grown tired of the noise, he’d got worn out by the constant sounds of the crowd. He wanted the silence of the crowd. He wanted to know what that silence sounded like.
A poppy wearer sat down next to him. Jack felt an urge to lean in and smell the cardboard flower fixed to the lapel. Then he felt an even stronger desire to ask, ‘Why do you wear that?’ But Jack didn’t like to speak to strangers. He tried to limit the number of people to whom he must speak: his mother, his sister and the three work colleagues who shared his cramped workspace. And now the eavesdroppers. In the presence of this new group in his life he must speak. Not only speak, he must share. It wasn’t as hard as he’d imagined. He’d said a few things at meetings. He’d even begun to hear a casual ease brewing in his remarks – Jack the wry commentator, Jack the lad.
The train grew steadily more crowded as it passed through each station, Monument . . . Canon Street . . . Mansion House . . . Blackfriars . . . Temple . . . Embankment. Fuller and fuller until the bloodless intercom announced “Westminster.” The train emptied as a block of bodies surged to get off, sweeping Jack with it, across the gap, onto the platform. Then up the steps he went, following the obedient backs, up, up into the street level world of sorrow and emptiness and guilt. So much guilt. He followed the sad snake of people as it crawled up Horse Guards Avenue and twisted round the corner into Whitehall. The snake halted and compacted into itself as it came to a barrier.
Jack had been expecting, almost wanting, the checkpoint, but he was unprepared for the policeman’s hands in his pockets. Yet that was nothing compared to what came next. He felt his entire body solidify as the man ran his hands down his inner thigh, perfunctory at first, then lingering at the back of his knees.
“You’ll do, mate. Go through.”
Jack had trouble getting the zip of his jacket done up with cold-stiffened fingers but a moment later it was done, his gloves returned to his hands and his hat pulled down over his ears. So many people, it was hard to walk in a straight line and he dodged left and right, right and left. He glanced behind; a woman smiled. Why had she smiled? Was she going to put her hands into his pockets too? He fingered the zip of his jacket and pushed further into the throng.
A small boy had inserted his head into a gap in a railing and his mother was pressing his ears back as she tried to ease him back out.
“Can I help?” Jack said.
“No,” she snapped, giving the child a painful-looking tug.
Jack walked on. He glimpsed the top of the Cenotaph over the heads of the crowd – the stone wreath, The Glorious Dead etched into the stone. Glorious. What glorious things were here? Or there? Then over the tops of people’s heads he spied the bishops coming, with their silver crooks held high, and golden crosses, and skirts flapping in the breeze, dragging their god into the godless street. He fought to suppress his anger, poor dead memories wrapped up in the skirts of the bishops. Then he spotted the politicians lining up: heads bowed, new haircuts, new hats, new suits of remembrance, their only fear the fear of the crowd.
People all around him were making themselves higher, balanced on walls and stretched up onto their toes whenever a new sound entered the confined space, a hint of something about to happen. But he didn’t want to be higher; Jack wanted to stay low. He squeezed himself between a tree and an empty pram. He looked down at the bare sheet, with the blanket pushed to the bottom, then surveyed the scene around him. It was all backs and sleeves and elbows. He closed his eyes and listened. People were talking round him, but he couldn’t hear what anyone was saying, just a murmur of words mixed together into the high notes of expectation. And all the time the old soldiers were marching past, brave necks, brave elbows, brave legs covered by blankets in wheelchairs as they rolled by. An endless line of brave elbows; Jack bit his thumbnail and sniffed. Something was in the air.
Jack looked at the people around him, up on their toes, necks stretched, mouths ajar. Then he saw the face of a baby through a slit in the crowd. He looked away, and then he looked up, briefly comforted by the sky, before scanning the buildings lining the street – high windows, high window ledges, places to get a good view, places for snipers to rest a rifle.
A cannon fired. He jumped. A clock began to strike, one, two, three . . . the people around him were getting into position . . . four, five, six . . . the baby was slipped into its pram, its eyes watching . . . seven, eight, nine . . . a man straightened his back and pushed out his chest . . . ten, eleven.
Then an invisible cloth seemed to drop down on the crowd; it held them all together in stiff silence, a silence so taut that Jack could hardly breathe. The baby stared. Why was it staring? Why wouldn’t it close its eyes and sleep in the silence, the jagged, crushing silence that seemed to squeeze fingers round Jack’s throat.
Jack closed his eyes again and listened; the leaves in the tree grated against each other, a rope flayed a flagpole, a handbag was wrenched open. That was the moment he had no choice. He slowly opened his mouth, sucked breath into his lungs and shouted. A giant, booming voice echoed down the length of the street. His voice.
The crowd remained silent and still. But the baby, the staring baby, turned its head and looked straight at him. A string of saliva dripped from its lips. Then sound erupted, men’s voices, women’s voices, voices, voices. Then the voices had words.
“What fucker said that? Him! Yeah, him. That bloke there! It was him, there. Right there! The little shit! Him? Yeah, him there. Him. It was him! The skinny fucker. There.”
Jack returned to his body.
“Him! Get him! Yeah, geddim!”
Jack began to run, shoving a path through the crowd. The pram shuddered as he tore by, but he didn’t look back. He didn’t. He didn’t. He ran. The baby bawled, the crowd bawled, still he ran, chased down the street by the weaving people, all shouting, dribbling, bawling.
Then it stopped. A white glove, a black sleeve, a polished cufflink – weight on his shoulder. Jack paused. The crowd paused, held at bay by the hand on the shoulder. Jack was aware only of the weight of fingers and the black eyes of the crowd. And so aware of his breath; it laboured in his chest, slowly, so slowly, in, out, in . . . out. . . .
The back window of the police car framed Jack’s last glimpse of his pursuers. They stretched their necks to see him; their eyes bulged. No sound, but he didn’t need sound to hear. He could read lips. He knew the mouth shapes of hate.
Jack closed his eyes, leant his head on the window and felt his muscles relax, succumbing to a warm and deep sense of calm. The back seat of the police car was comfortable, the upholstery soft to touch. The scent of lavender drifted from the air freshener dangling from the front mirror. Yet he didn’t dwell on the present. He didn’t dwell on what lay ahead. He dwelled on the recent past. A voice had soared down the street. His.
CHAPTER
25
Jean wore heels. She always wore heels, but that day she seemed to have chosen the pair with the most dramatic altitude which meant that as her feet brought her legs to the door of my office I could hear a little gap in her footsteps, not the sound of evenly spaced limbs but the broken rhythm of ankles out of s
ync. She didn’t like me. Jean. She’d whispered as much into Sammy’s ear at the Christmas party before last. She’d whispered I had a big head. I’d laughed when Sammy told me five minutes later, but then I’d spent the rest of the day worrying over her meaning.
She usually approached me with a ready-made comment, but that day as she materialised in the doorway she remained silent.
“Looking for me?” I said.
She tottered towards me and placed a newspaper down on my desk. I stared down at it. “What’s this?”
“Bottom right corner.” She stabbed her finger at a short article entitled, ‘Johnny ‘O’ gets night in the clink.’”
I was briefly distracted by the length of her nails, then started to read. Before I’d reached the second sentence, she was tapping a finger at the bottom of the page.
“There. . .! Not there. . . . That’s one of your . . . your people isn’t it?”
I scanned the new set of words. More than scanned, speed-read, the words running into each other.
“He was at the Cenotaph on Sunday,” said Jean. “He waited until the two-minute silence, and then, the bloody sod, he shouted out.” She brought her face close to mine as if I was hard of hearing. “He shouted out some crap.”
I met her eye. I smelt her accusing perfume. “What did he shout out?”
Jean dug her longest fingernail into the sentence. She drew in air from the room. “Why . . . all . . . this . . . hypocrisy?” She seemed to have rehearsed. She seemed to own the question.
“You mean that person–”
“Yes. It was him.”
“Shit! I didn’t. . . .”
“What?”
“I didn’t know it was him.”
“He is one of yours, isn’t he?”
I felt like a parent whose child had bitten a teacher. “Was it really him during the silence?”
“Yes.”
I looked back down at the article and read the final paragraph.
‘ . . . The man had to be rescued from the crowd by the police. He was charged with a public disorder offence at Paddington Police Station, but was released with a caution.’
“Little creep,” said Jean. “He should get time for this. It looked like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, but no, he has to go and disrespect us.”
“Us?”
“Oh, come on. You know what I’m talking about. He should be sent out to Afghanistan, see what it’s like. Then he won’t go shouting.
And look at his face. Smiling like a silly goat.”
I looked closely at the photo. Jack’s face was half-hidden by a man’s elbow. The face, yes, the face looked silly and frightened. But there was also a bit of a smile. Strange and twisted. Was it a smile of fear? Or – I peered closer – was it a smile of triumph?
I waited until evening before I plucked up the courage to go to Jack’s flat. I lingered at the exit to the Tube station, reading a discarded copy of the Evening Standard for several minutes before I felt confident enough to walk down the street and approach Jack’s building. It had the look of a council block that had been sold off, and I hesitated again, wondering how to find his door. There was a confusing array of buzzers labelled with peeling names, but Jack’s was typed in a fresh font. I pressed. As I waited I turned the question over in my mind once more. Should I tell him that I was there too? Should I mention that I too had heard his voice in the temporarily sacred street? But then, my pragmatic side argued, I’d have to explain what I was doing opposite the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday.
I wondered if I’d got him out of bed when he answered the door, but no, he reassured me, he’d been writing, an activity that always left him rumpled and creased and sometimes a little dirty.
He lived in the smallest flat I had ever been in – surely illegal I thought as we squeezed up the stairs. Surely the human body must require more room in which to breathe. I wondered about carbon monoxide levels as he moved aside to let me into the room.
“Jack,” I said. I was hardly out of my coat; the sofa hadn’t had time to warm up beneath my legs. “I saw your face on the front of yesterday’s Evening Standard.”
His smile sagged. “Do you mind if I have a cigarette?”
“It’s your house.”
“Do you want one?”
“Yes.” I didn’t smoke. I’d hadn’t held a cigarette in my hand since I was sixteen years old when I’d blown instead of sucked. I’d never tried a roll-up and began to regret my answer as I watched him take some Rizlas out and pinch some tobacco out of a small tin. The rolling was skillful, finished off with a quick flash of his tongue as he sealed the join.
“Here you go.”
“Thanks.”
He set to work on the second one. My fag lay limp in my fingers.
“Light?” he said.
“No, thanks.”
He leant back in his chair. Smoke is silent, but I was profoundly aware of the gentle put, put from his lips.
I shifted my centre of gravity forward. “Jack, what were you thinking?”
He drew on his cigarette and looked at me full in the face. “I wasn’t thinking.” He inhaled again. “But . . . I don’t regret it.”
I watched the smoke pour from his mouth. It curled round once then drifted slowly upwards. “Jack, I . . . okay, I won’t ask any more. I’ll try to . . . understand.”
“Will you?”
I looked down at the table – a ream of papers lay there, the corners dog-eared and grubby. “Is that your play?”
He drew more smoke into his lungs. “Not yet, but it might be, one day.”
He looked older than I remembered. Or younger.
“What’s it about?” I said.
He tapped his cigarette onto a saucer. “I can’t say.”
“Ah, I imagine it’s secret. Have to be careful of plagiarism.”
“It’s not that. I don’t know what it’s about.”
“Oh. Well, good luck with it.”
“Thank you.”
I laid the unlit cigarette on the table. “Thanks for that.”
“You’re welcome.”
“See you at the next meeting.”
He nodded.
I felt tired as I walked back down the stairs to the street. I had wanted to know what had possessed him to break such a sacred silence. But when the time came I didn’t want to know. Some things are meant to be private. Who was I to ask? Who was I to listen?
I walked slowly. I walked forwards, watching the Tube station grow bigger, then I walked backwards, watching Jack’s building get smaller and smaller. I turned, walked, turned, walked, trying to memorise the route from different directions, forwards and backwards, then backwards and forwards. Then my journey was interrupted; something darted out from beneath the eaves of a nearby house, and then disappeared into the darkness. I paused, my hand on my forehead, and looked up at the sky, the clouds grey on a black background. And then I was back in the other street. My mind rolled my thoughts backwards: the blood on my face, the pain in my eyeball, the fur on my cheek, the body slicing through the air, the creature clinging to the eaves.
JACK opened his sock drawer and pulled out the newspaper. The time spent in his pocket had left creases in the headline, lines on his face. He scanned the sentence, scared of its letters, terrified of its blackness on the page.
‘Unknown man breaks silence at Unknown Soldier’s tomb.’
He’d found the newspaper on an empty seat as soon as he got onto the Tube after leaving the police station. It had been left open on the editorial page where he’d read a gushing piece on London’s new bike lanes before he’d flicked back to the front page. And there, amongst the photographs of briskly marching veterans and shivering royalty he saw his own pale face, a face in a crowd, head tipped back, mouth contorted. Only three stops between Green Park and Oxford Circus, yet it seemed like ten. An inexplicable wait at Victoria, a rustle of papers at Embankment as a clutch of new arrivals settled down with their free news, and all the time the fear
of recognition, the matching of a face to a face. But none of his fellow travellers had looked in his direction. Not one had noticed how damp was his brow or that hands trembled in their midst.
He’d heard Mr. Harcourt approaching his flat. Each step told him the weight of the body, the wear on the heels, the tightness of the shoelaces. Even the amount of pressure on the doorbell told him it was Bill Harcourt’s finger. Jack knew he would be coming, he just hadn’t known when.
Jack half wished his employer had asked him more questions. He needed the question to answer the question. He’d gone to the Cenotaph to see. And hear. Nowhere in the city would there be a silence like that, one filled with people. After so much time on the Tube he’d begun to crave silence, just so as he could hear. He wanted to hear the city without sound. He imagined, in a scenario in his head, that when the people stopped talking, the traffic stopped moving and the machines stopped running, that he might hear something. Something he hadn’t heard before – the sound of the background. He lived in the background. It was his world. He wanted to hear his noise. But he didn’t recognise his noise when the moment came. And when the silence started he had to fill it.
Jack went into the kitchen and turned off his fridge. He closed all the windows and switched off the heating. He took off his watch and put it beneath his pillow. Then he removed the battery from his alarm clock and put it on the bedside table. Finally, he sat down at his computer, closed his eyes and began to type.
[Enter man]
Younger man: Do you mind if I have a cigarette?
Older man: It’s your house.
Younger man: Do you want one?
Older man: Yes.
Younger man: Here you go.
Older man: Thanks.
Younger man: Light?
Older man: No, thanks.
Younger man: I don’t regret it.
Older man: You should! You bloody well should! It’s a fucking disgrace.
Younger man: I don’t regret it.