Imagined Slights

by James Lovegrove

  "Are you uncomfortable?" she whispered.

  "Why, are you? Is there a spring sticking into your bum or something?"

  "No, you clot. Uncomfortable about being here."

  "No," I lied. "Are you?"

  "Yes."

  I only touched her. A kiss would have been too furtive, too adult. "I wonder how many visitors she's had in the past thirty years."

  Jill shook her head.

  Nana returned with a teapot and a plate laden with jam tarts and coconut macaroons and French fancies and bakewell slices, each fresh and separate, clean from the wrappers. I offered to fetch anything else that needed fetching from the kitchen.

  "No, Martin, I'll get the cups myself. I can still walk."

  Her tone agitated me. "I thought I might help, that's all."

  "I don't need help."

  "Crikey, she's pushed the boat out, hasn't she?" Jill said when Nana had left the room again. "Can she afford this?"

  "Maybe I should offer her some money."

  "Do. She'd hate that."

  "Martin, you're good at drawing. Draw me a homunculus."

  "What's a halum - a halumculus, Nana?"

  "Homunculus, Martin. A little man, an evil little man."

  "What crayon should I use?"

  "Grammar, Martin. WHICH crayon. Use the red. Monsters are always red."

  "Mummy says I shouldn't do everything you tell me. She says it's bad for me. She says you fill my head with funny ideas."

  "She should say it to my face. Who's been around longer, do you suppose, Martin? Your mother or me?"

  "You, of course."

  "Then I know better than her. I know what's good for you. Draw me a homunculus."

  "How big is it exactly?"

  "It should be a little bit larger than a child. It should bend and stoop and walk with a limp. Its eyes should not look in the same direction as each other."

  "Crossed?"

  "No, the other way."

  "I suppose I should ask what you're doing now." Nana could have sounded more enthusiastic.

  "I'm a cartoonist."

  "And what do you cartoon?"

  Grammar, Nana, I thought to myself, although I remembered someone saying once that the noun didn't exist that couldn't be verbed. I said, "Comic books. Horror stories, mostly. I have a knack for drawing horror stories."

  Nana's wrinkles made more wrinkles. New valleys and hills appeared on the island of her face, as though the island was in fact a vast sea-monster on whose back a shipload of unwary travellers had staked their claim. Now the creature was awakening. Make for the boats! The ground is alive!

  "I think it was because of what you encouraged me to draw," I said.

  "Nice to know my advice lives on after me. Though it's hardly art, is it?"

  "It's a living."

  "Cake, dear?" Nana extended the plate to Jill, who refused. Nana tutted. "Girls these days worry too much about their weight. Take plenty of exercise and you can eat as much as you like, that's what I say."

  "I do take exercise." Politeness buried the sneer deep down in Jill's words where it could be detected but was too deep to be remarked upon.

  "I'll certainly have one," I said. I chose a strawberry tart - a single fruit perched on a iceberg of cream that bulged as I bit into it and foamed over my chin. The sharpness of the jam pricked nostalgia out of its hidey-hole. Melancholy beast that it was, the Eeyore of emotions, it prompted me to say, "Where do you find these, Nana? I didn't think they made them any more, not this way, not this good."

  "The bakery's still going. Any reason it should have closed?" There - the flash of dentures that indicated that Nana had said something she was pleased about. "Do you remember our trips to the bakery, Martin? You used to look forward to them all week."

  "I did?"

  Nana tilted her head back and regarded me with minute satisfaction. "I'm glad you said that, Martin, because I never took you or anyone to the bakery, I always went on my own. You'd be surprised how many of you say you did go. Say that and plenty of other things. I can twist you around and about and upside down until I have you remembering things that couldn't possibly have happened to you. I can invent whole new childhoods for you, if I want."

  "You won't do that with me. I can remember it all. How you used to feed us and the cats and break up fights and tell us stories and everything."

  Jill had begun to fidget. I had told her this morning that she need not come, but she had insisted, and when Jill put her foot down she put it down so hard it went through the floorboards. So in a sense she deserved to be bored, but the fact that she was showing it irritated me.

  "Are you successful?" Nana asked.

  I said that if she meant in terms of income, just barely, but in terms of artistic satisfaction I was exactly where I wanted to be, although I was forever searching for new and better techniques, greater skill, dexterity, refinement.

  We fell into silence, an awkward lock in which no key seemed to fit.

  Then, slowly, ponderously, the old clock gave a tick - a single, solitary tick, loud as a gunshot, and the minute hand clicked on to four to ten.

  "It works!" I yelped.

  "It does," Nana replied evenly.

  Jill looked as if she had been stabbed in the leg with a needle. "That gave me a fright. I thought I was going to have a heart attack."

  "A young, slim, well-exercised person like you?" said Nana.

  By her eyes I could tell that Jill was contemplating murder. Why had I brought her along? No, more accurately: why had I allowed her to convince me to let her tag along? Come to think of it, why was I here at all? Was I really so insecure, in myself and about the future, that I needed some reassurance from yesterday before launching myself into tomorrow?

  Nana, as ever, knew what I was thinking. "Why have you come, Martin? Be honest."

  "I came to see you."

  "I said be honest. You didn't believe that I'd still be alive, surely."

  I wasn't prepared to answer that.

  Jill was. "No."

  "But here I am."

  "And you haven't changed a bit," I said. It was trite, but it was all part of an effort to patch up the damaged atmosphere in the room.

  "That's what you all say. You've all been back. You're the last of your lot, Martin. Jeremy, William, Jimmy, Annie, even Fergus, and the others, they've all been back to gloat over old Nana's grave and found old Nana isn't quite as dead and gone as they expected." Her eyes glimmered in the sepia light that was growing dimmer as the sun sank over the rooftops on the shadowy side of the street. "You thought I'd disappear when you grew up and left. You thought I'd stop living because supplying you with cakes and games and stories was the only thing that kept me alive, the only thing I considered worth carrying on for. You and all the others. But you forgot something."

  "Hormone replacement therapy?" Jill was never one to resist a barbed comment if she felt the recipient was deserving.

  Nana glared at her. For a second her eyes swelled in their leathery pouches.

  "You," Nana said to me exclusively, "forgot that children are immortal."

  "They grow up, they die like everyone else," I pointed out.

  "A child does, yes, of course, but children do not. For every one that leaves, a new arrival steps in to fill its shoes. Did I ever tell you about the Hydra, Martin?"

  "Yes, Nana, dozens of times."

  "How if you cut off one head two more appeared in its place?"

  "Yes, Nana. I understand."

  "And do you remember telling me that you believed that, if you shut your eyes, no one else could see you?"

  "Yes," I said, vaguely embarrassed. It had seemed a reasonable enough assumption at the time.

  "You still believe it. You still believe that the world grinds to a halt whenever you leave a room and people cease to exist whenever you drift out of their lives."

  As a matter of fact, whenever I leave a room I believe that people are sniggering about me. There goes the arrested-de
veloper who draws comics for a living! But I didn't say anything.

  "But I'm still here, Martin," said Nana. "So I ask again: why have you come?"

  I had no answer to that.

  Someone rapped at the front door. In the seconds that followed I heard - probably from a neighbouring garden, although I could have sworn it came from just outside the room, in the hallway - the skitter-scratch of claws and the yapping of a little dog pretending that it was a big dog. Jill heard it, too. She cocked her head. Nana gazed wisely at both of us. The yapping died away. Nana set down her cup.

  "You'd better leave now. I have visitors."

  We rose to our feet, sending chalk-scented curls of dust boiling through the air. Nana peered upwards, the effort stretching and straining the tendons in her neck.

  "It was good to see you, Nana," I said.

  "Was it? Then I'm glad. For your sake. And I'm glad to have met your wife. It's nice to know how my old children are getting on with their new lives."

  The door was rapped again.

  On an impulse I asked, "Could I take a cake, please? One for the road. They're so good."

  "You always used to, Martin. You always loved to munch on a cake on the way back to your house, didn't you? Yes. Which would you prefer?"

  "Strawberry tart, definitely. Please."

  "You used to put them in your pocket to take them home, didn't you? And your mother always complained about the mess."

  "Some things never change," Jill muttered. "You're still a pig."

  "We'd better wrap it," Nana said. "I have some greaseproof paper. Give."

  I took a tart from the plate and handed it to her. She disappeared and returned a minute later with a parcel of paper containing the tart. Shiny stains were already forming on the paper, and the colour of strawberry glimmered through.

  At the front door Nana welcomed in a girl and a boy aged around six or seven, twins with carroty hair and a smattering of freckles. They regarded Jill and me with curiosity and suspicion.

  "Gemma, Dean, you go into the front room and get out a jigsaw. These grown-ups are just leaving. And help yourself to cakes. I've put them out ready for you."

  "OK," chorused Gemma and Dean as one, and they ran down the hallway and into the front room.

  "Their mother died recently," Nana explained, "and their father doesn't get home till six, so I look after them between school and then."

  "Goodbye, Nana," I said.

  "Yes, lovely meeting you," Jill said.

  "At least we've said a proper goodbye," said Nana, brushing my cheek with a monkey-paw hand.

  As she closed the door on us, her head lowered to its usual position. Tendons slackened, wrinkles relaxed. Her eyes were no doubt relieved to return to the ground.

  "Here I am," I heard her say, her voice diminishing as she turned.

  The street had grown life while we had been indoors. A petrol-driven lawnmower was droning, pulling along a man in vest and braces. Kids were holding skateboard races, though they spent more time falling off their boards than actually racing. A radio sang to the sunset. Somewhere a pigeon fluted and purred.

  Jill and I walked solemnly back to the car. I laid the tart on the back seat.

  As we were strapping ourselves in, she broke the silence.

  "Can you look me straight in the eye and say, sincerely, that you feel better for that?"

  "No, I don't. But I do feel less guilty."

  "Did you used to feel guilty?"

  "About deserting her? I guess so."

  "I bet she'd have liked that."

  "Don't be so hard on her."

  "Like she wasn't hard on you!"

  "That's how she is. That was always her way. She was always a bit stern, a bit fierce, even when she was being kind. Especially when she was being kind."

  Although the argument was far from won, Jill called a truce by saying, "Well, you ought to know."

  I started the car and pulled out, careful to avoid the children hurtling along the rippled concrete.

  About a hundred yards down the street I had to stop.

  "Damn her."

  "What is it, Mart?" Jill asked.

  "Will you drive?"

  "Of course. What is it? What's wrong?"

  I turned to her. Tears were brimming in my eyes, ready to spill. Tears of anger mixed with sorrow.

  "I've just realised," I told her. "What Nana said about taking cakes home in my pocket. I never did. It never happened. Never. Never!"

  The Gift

  They never knocked, just came right in. Didn't kick down the door, nothing so thuggish as that. A universal key unit could pop the lock in an instant, and so save them from a suit for unlawful damage.

  They could turn up at any time of night or day, but they preferred to come at night, when there was more chance of finding you in. Either way, it was best to be prepared. Aaron had taken to wearing pyjamas even when the darkness sweltered and he had to sleep with the air conditioning full on. There was nothing more humiliating than to wake up with a flashlight blazing in your face and half a dozen men and women in cream-coloured suits staring down at your vulnerably naked body, then to fumble your way into a pair of undershorts and a T-shirt while the same men and women in cream-coloured suits looked on, like bored scientists observing yet another run-through of a tried-and-tested experiment. It wasn't so much that they didn't know the meaning of modesty, it was the fact that they didn't care. So the pyjamas stayed on, even if Aaron felt he was in danger of sweating to death inside them.

  Like so many people in his line of work, Aaron had developed something of an instinct about the raids. In the same way that you often wake up a few seconds before your alarm clock goes off, so Aaron would usually snap out of sleep just before the door lock went. Perhaps he was responding to some subliminal cue - a stifled breath, a stealthy footfall - which his ears picked up while the rest of his body slumbered. Perhaps he just knew a raid was coming the way wild animals sense an impending thunderstorm.

  Tonight, though, his instinct failed him. It wasn't until an FPP officer was shaking him by the shoulder and aiming half a hundred watts of candlepower at his eyelids that he emerged from the Land of Nod, pawing at the air, curled and mewling like a ragged kitten.

  More than the grabbing hands and the rough voices, Aaron was acutely conscious of the clamminess of his pyjama jacket as he awoke, and also of the need to urinate, a need that was going to become an urge very soon. It was this, more than anything, that concerned him as he rolled upright, swung his legs over the side of the bed, sat up, rested his elbows on his knees and his forehead in his hands, groaned, ground the heels of his palms in his eye-sockets, and finally looked up, squinting grittily into the miniature sun of the flashlight. His need to pee was a weakness, and he didn't want to show weakness, any weakness.

  "Aaron Novak?"

  "What do you think?"

  "Aaron Novak of Apartment a hundred and seventeen B, Seaview Tower?"

  Aaron shuttled his fingers through his hair. "Do you see the sea out of that window?"

  "Answer the question."

  "Yeah. Yeah, that's me."

  "Stand up, please."

  "I was just pointing out the fact that whoever thought to call this building Seaview Tower either had a lousy sense of humour or X-ray vision," said Aaron, getting to his feet.

  "Please keep your comments to yourself, Mr Novak."

  "Sure. Just trying to break the ice, you know?"

  The bedroom light came on. There were only four FPP officers tonight. Each was wearing the de rigeur cream-coloured two-piece and the brass badge with TRUST written on it in letters and manufolded hands. In deference to the weather, one had undone his shirt-collar button beneath the knot of his tie. As ever, it was the Englishman, Captain Silas Gregory, leading the raid.

  "Mr Novak," Gregory said, with a formal nod.

  "Captain," Aaron replied, with a respect that wasn't entirely feigned.

  "You know the drill." Gregory held out a hardcopy wa
rrant. "Read this and sign."

  Aaron waved a hand. "Just get on with the search. I know what it says."

  "You must sign it," said Gregory, thrusting the warrant under Aaron's nose. "It absolves us of any responsibility for breakage or loss incurred during the execution of our duty. Without your signature we leave ourselves open to a lawsuit."

  "And if I refuse to sign?" As if he wasn't going to.

  "Signatures can be coerced."

  "Yeah," said Aaron, "painfully. And then, of course, I'll have signed a document that says that I can't have any comeback for something already done to me."

  "Procedure must be observed," said Gregory. A dry smile bristled below his moustache, revealing a glimpse of typically bad British dentistry. "Please, Mr Novak." He held out the warrant again. "For your own good?"

  Aaron took the document and also the pen Gregory offered him, and signed.

  "You won't find anything," he said, returning pen and warrant.

  "That remains to be seen." Gregory produced an FPP-issue organiser from his jacket pocket, keyed up a digital facsimile of Aaron's signature and compared it with the one on the warrant. "Close enough," he said. He turned to his three subordinates. "Off you go."

  The FPP officers set about the task of ransacking the apartment with an enthusiasm that neither professional competence nor job-familiarity nor their habitual impassivity could entirely disguise. They opened, they overturned, they scattered, they emptied, they peered behind, they looked under, they crawled over, they fingered, they flicked through, they unfolded, they shook out, they prised apart, they undid, they unscrewed, they held up to the light, they squinted at, they scanned, and all the time they grinned, to each other, to themselves, gleefully.

  Meanwhile Captain Gregory stood by the uncurtained bedroom window with his hands clasped lightly together behind his back, gazing out through the huge sheet of glass at the night-time city. The lit windows of the buildings opposite shimmered in the billows of Floridan heat rising from the broiling street. Rooftop parties thumped away around sapphire swimming pools. A huge pleasure dirigible glided across the sky; festooned with fairy-lights, it resembled some giant floating chandelier. A dozen microlight aircraft buzzed in its wake, riding the bumpy currents of its slipstream like scavenger fish following a shark. From beside the bed Aaron watched the captain watching the city, and observed a humble silence while the pressure in his bladder slowly mounted in an exquisite crescendo.