Imagined Slights

by James Lovegrove

  "All I know is this. I've been searching for that park ever since. For four months I've been roaming London in a state of shock. I've hardly slept, I've hardly eaten, I've hardly communicated with anyone - I've talked more this past half-hour than I have in the entire past four months. I've just walked and walked and walked, gradually coming to look like a cartoon parody of a tramp, and hoping constantly, with the desperation of a fool, that somehow I'll find a way back to the park, or another park like it, another pocket of perfection in an otherwise ruined world.

  "At times I think I've been close. Once or twice I've heard a distant rumbling, but so far away, too far away to be sure that it wasn't just a bus revving in the next street or a tube train thundering below my feet. Once or twice I've detected a change in the quality of the light, but how can I know for certain it wasn't just a cloud passing in front of the sun or my eyes playing tricks on me? I can't. I can't be sure of anything except that the park was real, that the peace I felt there was real, and that I will never stop looking until I find both that park and that peace again.

  "What do you call it, Mark, when you get a taste of heaven and realise that nothing will ever be that sweet again?"

  "Growing up? Growing old?" I hazarded.

  Harold lowered his gaze to look at his cracked, frostbitten hands. "I call it Hell," he said, simply.

  There wasn't much else to be said. The alarm clock trilled in the bedroom, slowly winding down to silence. Outside the street had become marginally brighter, and every so often a car swished past. Lights were on in some of the windows opposite. London and its inhabitants were gearing themselves up for another day.

  "Harold," I offered tentatively, "how about I take you to a doctor? Get you looked at?"

  "What's the point?" he said, after a moment of actually looking like he was considering it.

  "The point is, frankly, you're in awful shape, and in my opinion if you're not careful and you carry on the way you have been, you're going to do yourself irreparable harm."

  "And in my opinion I think I should be going now." So saying, Harold rose stiffly to his feet.

  "Harold," I said, "you're crazy."

  "Mark, I wish I were," he replied, and turned to go.

  I didn't stop him. I know I should have, but really, what could I have done? Manhandled him down the stairs and wrestled him into a taxi? Knocked him unconscious with a candlestick and called for an ambulance? I had no right to force Harold to do anything he didn't want to do. Or so I justified it to myself then, and have been justifying it ever since. The fact is, I watched Harold shuffle out of the flat and listened to him make his way painfully down the stairs and didn't lift a finger to prevent him because right at that moment I hated him. I hated him for having sat there in my armchair and manufactured a story of utter preposterousness - possibly the most ludicrous and pointless story he had ever told, not to mention the hardest to disprove - rather than simply owned up to the truth. What the truth was I had no idea (I fear he actually had contracted a terminal illness), but whatever the real reason for Harold's physical and spiritual deterioration, I hated him for not having the courage to share it with me. Until then his stories had been a source of amusement and wry pleasure, but that morning I saw Harold clearly for the first time, saw him for the pathetic, deluded, degraded man he was, a man so vain and yet so devoid of self-esteem that he felt he had to lie to make himself interesting.

  And I'll tell you this, too. I have never seen Harold since that morning, which is getting on for half a year ago now. Neither has anyone else, and it seems to all intents and purposes that he has vanished off the face of the earth. And while an ungenerous part of me thinks good riddance, another kinder part hopes that wherever Harold is, he has found his park again.

  In the meantime, whenever I'm walking around London, I find myself half listening out for what Harold called a "shift", a faint, far-off rumble that will mean that the city has in some way reconfigured itself to show another facet briefly to the world, revealing the truth behind the façade - or the façade behind the truth (Harold would have known the difference). And for all my cynicism, for all my scepticism, I find myself hoping that, in this one instance, Harold was on the level.

  Well, you never know.

  Nana

  Nana was nobody's mother and a mother to everyone on our street.

  Asking Nana her age was like asking why the sky was blue or the grass green. She would reply, "I'm my age," and that was the best answer anyone could hope for.

  I have always thought of Nana in terms of her wrinkles - contour lines on a map of a well-known, much-loved treasure island.

  Nana had been a young woman when Queen Victoria died, and she was all of Edwardian England bound up in a bundle of bones, skin and woollen clothing.

  Nana was like mountains: ancient, craggy, awe-inspiring and always there.

  If you stayed awake, gummy-eyed, till midnight and dared to peek out of your bedroom window, you might well see Nana pacing slowly along the pavement, inspecting beneath cars and hedges, a brown paper bag in her hand. Nana cared for everyone in our street, even the stray cats. She would lay out fish heads and chicken legs for them and then walk away. A cat would sniff the food. Nana would look round. The cat would vanish beneath the hedge or car where it had been hiding. Nana would resume walking. The cat would ease its body out again. Nana would look round. The cat would vanish. Nana would carry on. The cat would appear again, snatch the titbit, wolf it down in three gulps, then vanish again. Nana would smile to herself.

  I used to imagine she bore an iron weight on her shoulders - a hundred pounds or more, invisible - that bent her neck horizontal so that cats, children and the ground were all she could see. Not forgetting, of course, Hamish, her little Scottie who fancied himself a Great Dane.

  That was Nana, and to be honest I did not expect her to be alive when I returned to the street. Nor, from my frequent and enthusiastic descriptions of the woman who had looked after me on countless afternoons between the ages of three and six, did Jill, who pointed out that while women as a rule live longer than men - and a very sensible rule it was, too - there were few people living, of either sex, who could remember the nineteenth century as anything more than stories handed down to them by long-dead grandparents.

  Trust Jill to get in that crack about men.

  "You don't know Nana," I said, locking the car door.

  "Maybe," was all she said.

  It was teatime, and the street was empty except for parked cars. It was a broad street in an area of the suburbs which, if not exactly well-to-do, had a nodding acquaintance with respectability. Each boxy house sat in its own half-acre of garden, with a garage to the side and its front door protected by an arching porch. The road itself was made up of huge sections of concrete joined with strips of tar.

  "Changed much?" Jill asked, adding, "Dumb question, I suppose."

  "A question is only as dumb as she who asks it," I said, going round the front of our car and extending an arm across her back to rest my hand in the curve between rib and hip.

  "Answer me," she threatened.

  "Yes, it's basically the same. The houses are the same bricks and mortar, though the paint's new on most of them, but all the elms have gone. This used to be a tree-lined avenue, you know. I guess Dutch Elm Disease must have got them and no one thought to replace them with anything else. Oddly enough, it seems much narrower now without them."

  She gave me that funny-quizzical, crinkled-nose look, the one I had fallen for a year and a half ago, the look that said, You're a fool but then so am I, and if we both insist on being fools then let's at least be fools together.

  "Thanks for coming with me," I said. "It's as if there's something I've got to lay to rest before I can move on to the next stage."

  "I understand." She pecked me on the cheek.

  "I couldn't do it on my own. I wouldn't have the courage."

  "I know. You're a complete wimp."

  I dug my fingers into her side an
d she folded over, giggling and trying to poke me in the balls, but once I had started tickling her she was hopelessly in my power and, my physical superiority having been established, all that was left to her was verbal violence. Between laughing gasps she said, "If you don't ... bloody stop ... you'll be spending the next month ... sleeping on the bloody ... sofa!"

  I stopped. That kind of blackmail you do not mess about with.

  She made one last attempt to jab her fingers into my crotch, and I stepped smartly back and banged my calf on the car's bumper.

  "Bugger!"

  "Serves you right."

  We found the old family homestead. Number Eleven. Whoever was living there now had reglazed the downstairs windows with mottled glass and covered the walls with stone cladding. A cartwheel leaned against the door and - another rustic touch - the porch was adorned with a pair of carriage lanterns.

  "Another victory for your mother's appalling bad taste," Jill said.

  "Screw you, sweetie. Nothing to do with her."

  "You surprise me."

  "You know, I bet my initials are still chalked on the inside of the fireplace."

  "They'll have bricked it up, stuck in a coal-effect gas fire and surrounded it in fake marble."

  "Maybe, but my initials are still there, even if nobody can see them. Anyway, we're not interested in that house."

  "Oh, we aren't, are we?"

  "No."

  "Where did she live?"

  "Number Thirty-six."

  We looked both ways, and nothing was coming, and we crossed the street.

  I had turned thirty-six last February. When I last saw Nana, just before my father's work took the family away from this street and this city, I had been six. Thirty-six being the square of six, I decided to share this numerical coincidence with Jill. "Funny how it all adds up, isn't it?"

  She was unimpressed. I don't think the Apocalypse will impress Jill. As Hell spews forth its demons and the Four Horsemen gallop across the land and the armies of Good and Evil battle it out on the plain of Megiddo beneath a purple thunderous sky, Jill will shrug, yawn and say she's seen better.

  Thirty-six had further magical properties for the amateur numerologist like me. Divisible by three and four (both lucky), and by twelve (three times four, ultra-lucky), with its two digits totalling nine (the trinity of trinities), it was, in fact, the number of numbers.

  And it was the number of Nana's house.

  And as we neared Number Thirty-six, I myself square-rooted. I became six again, and the hedges sprouted and grew tall until their tops were unseen plateaux, and suddenly the gate to Number Eighteen once more caged a gigantic barking Alsatian, and outside the door to Number Twenty-two I knew there was a red scooter flipped over on to its side, propped at an angle by ram's-horn handlebars.

  Some of these houses were safe ground, the homes of friends. There was Jimmy's house, and there Annette's, and there the twins', Jeremy and William, or Ger and Bil as we used to know them. But one was enemy territory, home to the street bully Fergus, bastard son of Torquemada and Lucrezia Borgia, nephew of Genghis Khan and favourite godson of Attila the Hun. At the thought of Fergus my ears started to sting from his pinches and my shins to ache from his kicks, and though I was thirty-six and a little over six feet tall, I still tiptoed past the gate to his house, Number Twenty-eight, in case...

  Just in case.

  Jill sensed the change that had come over me, the boy still quivering in tumultuous fear of Fergus and his pinches and his jeers and his bruisings, and she hugged me more tightly.

  Number Thirty-six.

  "Here we are."

  Jill said it, peering at the rusty numerals on the gatepost. She said it because I was saying nothing. Anything I said would have emerged as the reedy treble of a six-year-old. I knew for a fact that I was six years old now because here was Nana's house as if the intervening three decades since I had last been here had never happened, as if time was an irrelevancy and growing old just a figure of speech. The grass might have been a little shaggier than I remembered and the fence that ran alongside the stone path to the front door might have developed something of a sag in the middle, but in every other respect Nana's house was exactly as I had last seen it. The brick-lined arch over the doorway was just as weather-beaten and the paintwork was that same unmistakable rust-red, the colour of cough drops, and yellowed lace curtains frilled the windows.

  Eventually I did speak. "My God." My own voice, thank Christ. Cigarette-tuned, whisky-pitched.

  "Where are you going, Martin?"

  "Nowhere, Nana."

  "Then you won't mind coming straight back here and sitting down while I tell you about Springheel Jack."

  "You've told me about Springheel Jack a million billion times."

  "'Springheel Jack was a murderer of fallen women...'"

  "'...who terrorised the fog-bound streets of Old London.' I know. I've heard it all before. What's a fallen woman, Nana?"

  "Keep still and listen to the rest of the story."

  "When are mummy and daddy coming back?"

  "Later."

  "Not soon?"

  "Later. But later can wait until it's good and ready. For now, you are to listen to me. 'Springheel Jack...'"

  "Where are you going, Mart?"

  "To ring the doorbell. What else?"

  "You don't seriously think... You can't just... Oh, for heaven's sake." Jill rolled her eyes and chased after me up the path. "If you're so set on making a complete prat of yourself, I suppose I can always pretend I'm your care-in-the-community social worker."

  I travelled the length of the path in a few short strides, where once it had taken a mean fourteen (avoiding the cracks, naturally). And I reached down, not up, to press the doorbell.

  A chime tolled deep within the house. I honestly expected Hamish to come yap-snarl-yapping up to the door and push his wet black nose through the flap of the letter-box, which was at shoe height. I had to remind myself that dogs do not live that long. Nor do humans, not even the female of the species.

  "And what, pray, do you intend to say when a complete stranger opens the door?" Jill whispered.

  "That we're Jehovah's Witnesses."

  But no stranger opened the door.

  Nana did.

  She blinked in the sunshine, shielded her eyes, said, "Who is it?", and then said, "Oh, it's you. I remember you. Martin. Martin from Number Eleven." She lowered her hand to reveal her face in all its wrinkled splendour: the lines that shaped the dormant volcanoes of her eyes and the bottomless crevice of her mouth. Here, and here, and here, was treasure.

  In an ecstasy of remembrance I gasped, "Nana, you haven't changed a bit."

  It was no lie: she had not. I'm prepared to swear an oath on it. She was still wearing the same old housecoat with its floral pattern of indeterminate era, gaudy and sun-faded, and she was still labouring under the same invisible weight that had raised the vertebrae in her neck to form a reptilian ridge that creaked audibly as she looked inquisitively up at my face.

  "You have." She flashed yellow denture. This was her smile. "I preferred you when you were smaller. At least I could see you properly then."

  "Nana, this is my wife Jill. Jill, Nana."

  Jill's hello was guarded but polite.

  Nana turned to me. "You always come with your wives and husbands," she said darkly.

  "Who do?"

  "You children. Suddenly, when you get married, you remember me." Her expression shifted, brightening abruptly like a hillside no longer shadowed by cloud. "But where are my manners? Come in, come in. Enter freely and of your own will."

  I followed Nana's stiffly swaying form into the hallway, but Jill hung back, not sure whether she belonged here. I beckoned to her, and she came.

  "A vampire, Martin, cannot enter a house unless he has been invited by a member of the household. This is useful to remember should the vampires come knocking at your door, demanding entry so they can SUCK YOUR BLOOD!"

  "Ssh, Nana,
you're being scary."

  "Vampires ARE scary, Martin. They're not to be taken lightly. They come into your life and won't leave you alone until you're drained and wasted, a pale shell of yourself. Not that a chubby fellow like you need worry too much about that. But never, ever let one into your house."

  "How will I recognise a vampire when I see one?"

  "By its pale face and pale skin, its blood-red eyes and blood-red lips, its night-black hair and night-black cloak. But you don't need to see these things to know if somebody is a vampire. You sense it. Every hair on your body stands on end. Hamish here met a vampire once, and he howled and his coat went stiffer than a wire brush, didn't it, boy? Yes, it did, it diiiid..."

  "Tea, of course," said Nana. "Tea for three. And cakes. I have some cakes in the kitchen."

  Nana shuffled out of the front room leaving Jill and myself sitting on the sofa in doubt-filled silence. The sun shining through the shroud of lace curtain tinted the air sepia. The old clock in its case of walnut had stopped at five to ten. (Its steady, reverberant tick used to sneak whole hours past me without my noticing.) The furniture and bric-a-brac were too old to have gone out of fashion. Antique porcelain dogs danced with china ballerinas, as they had danced when I was six, across clean varnished surfaces, leaving no footprints. I tried to see the room through Jill's eyes, which had never beheld all this before and so found nothing special about it, nothing that triggered off a dozen memories brighter and more explosive than fireworks. For her, that tray had never framed a jigsaw in the making. For her, that table had never been the scene of countless games of gin rummy that continued until I finally won a hand. For her, that carpet, those dusty Turkish swirls, had never been a battlefield for battalions of plastic soldiers.