The Secret Life of the Panda

by Nick Jackson

  Shells grow by small accretions, by the layering of calcite and aragonite. It is the work of decades. As he pressed each fragment into place and smoothed the grout with his fingers, Vernon felt intensely happy. In the moulding of these ribs of glass and concrete he felt he was nudging something into place. He could have been touching flesh as he pressed and poked. The foil wrappers glinted with a sudden numinous energy in the dim light as he prodded them into position. Time was unmeasured in this coiled space—his physical needs seemed to fade. Finally, a raging hunger or thirst would come over him and he would stagger into the kitchen in search of a loaf of bread or a carton of milk to fill the space. Or chop an onion and stuff it, raw, into his mouth.

  *

  A staircase spiralled up inside and there were windows at intervals in the curving walls. These windows were filled with tinted glass: amber and rose and green so that walking up the stairs you were bathed in bands of colour. The spaces between the windows were formed of fragments of glass and tile embedded in concrete. The glass was from milk-of-magnesia and Seven-Up bottles and marmite jars saved over three decades by Vernon’s mother under the stairs in boxes.

  In the layering of his glass and coloured foil, Vernon was unaware of the passage of time. The seasons came and went. He laboured in rain and snow, buffeted by winds and baked by sun.

  Carl was back, helping now to heave the sacks of cement and grout and wielding a hammer to break up the tiles.

  One day, Vernon stumbled among the glass fragments and the boy stepped forward with startling speed and stopped him from falling. His arms had grown solid. Vernon realised that he was no longer that anxious child; his face was pale and bony but no longer pinched and narrow; it had filled out and coarsened with bristles.

  “How old are you?”

  “Seventeen.”

  Vernon was shocked; he looked down at his own wrinkled hands, the splintered yellow nails and swollen veins. “Still at school?”

  “No.”

  “You left school?” Vernon felt he should have been consulted.

  Carl shrugged and hefted a bag of tiles. “Where do you want these?”

  There was a sense of urgency now about finishing the structure, now that Vernon thought he could see it complete. He imagined going up the stairs, the light growing with each step, until he was at the summit. No one, not even the ghosts of the long dead, would disturb the geometry of his thoughts. Only the coloured shafts of light would enter in to soothe his meditation.

  One evening as they cleared up, Vernon was compelled to make an announcement: “It’s finished,” he told the boy, who was at the awkward age of never looking directly, so that Vernon had no idea whether he’d heard or gone further than even Vernon himself, down some pathway of the mind.

  “What then,” said the boy, “do I do now?” He was full of something, though he didn’t know what it was yet; he was on the verge. He stirred pieces of brick and old rusty nails with the toe of his boot.

  “It’s your decision, what you do with your life,” Vernon said.

  No one had ever spoken to the boy about deciding. He felt as though he was standing on the edge and must jump, before he was pushed.

  “Maybe a building course,” suggested Vernon, “if you like the idea of being a builder.”

  The boy looked—a quick frightened look; their eyes, for a moment colliding.

  “You OK?”

  The boy didn’t answer immediately. “You’re getting rid of me,” he said finally with something like his old whisper.

  “No.”

  “That’s what it seems like.”

  Vernon shrugged: “What do you want?” He drove his shovel into the earth.

  “Nothing.” Carl walked away, kicking at the weeds and muttering.

  Vernon wondered what it was people wanted from him. As the gate clicked and the boy’s footsteps died away, he heard the sound echo from the entrance to the tower and a sense of emptiness reached out to him.

  *

  This time Carl wouldn’t go back. He’d had enough of this old man and his crazy plans. At home he lay on his bed, naked, and began to touch himself thinking of a man he’d seen in the changing rooms at the swimming pool. His penis became stiff in his hand and soon he spilled himself, except that at the last moment his mind flicked back to the great white tower he had helped to erect; the nacreous walls thrusting up in the deserted weed-grown garden.

  Late the next morning, standing in the street outside Vernon’s house, Carl watched for a while but there was no sign of Vernon. He went into the garden and found some boxes and a stack of old wooden scaffolding, piling them up at the foot of the tower. Then he pulled a can of lighter fuel out of his pocket. The fire was slow to catch; Carl almost stamped it out but, once the cardboard was ablaze, he stood back and warmed himself, enjoying the sense of relief and excitement as the flames took hold. Then he ran, not looking back. He’d go to a place he knew where men hunted each other for sex among the thick foliage. It was time to do this. He would find no redemption in the walls of towers, no matter how extravagantly carved.

  *

  Mrs Crabbe’s canary fluttered in its cage and scrabbled with its claws.

  “What is it?” asked Mrs Crabbe. “What’s wrong with you?” She stared at the bird which stretched its wings and opened its beak in a silent gape, as though in pain. Then, abruptly, it fell from its perch.

  Mrs Crabbe took up the sleek yellow body. Its eyes were half-closed, then it stiffened and hopped upright on her hand. She posted it back into its cage.

  “What’s that smell? It’s like something burning.” She wondered if she’d left the grill on and went through to the kitchenette. From there she could see Vernon’s garden and the peculiar thing he was working on. A stream of smoke was pouring out of the entrance. Someone had heaped cardboard boxes against the walls. The young greedy flames flickered, reaching out for support and finding the wooden struts. From there they leapt eagerly, drawn up inside the tower by the spiralling up-draughts. The windows of coloured glass glowed before exploding in a shower of sparks.

  *

  Mr Kelly put down his coffee cup. It was lunch time and the playground was filling up: some children stood in knots while others careered about; as usual, there was a cluster of bodies outside the toilet block. He went back to his spreadsheet with a frown; the figures weren’t adding up. Glancing up a few minutes later he thought there seemed to be fewer children; the group outside the toilet block had broken up. The spreadsheet scrolled down.

  It was only after he’d finished his lunch that he noticed how silent and empty the playground was. Leaning forward and peering round to his left, he could just make out part of the playing field. The press of bodies looked like a rugby scrum. Mr Kelly reached for his scarf and headed down the corridor.

  It was a windy day; the gusts caught Mr Kelly’s coat tails as he hurried across the football pitch. There were now no more than a dozen or so children at the fence. They seemed to be trying to peer through the palings at what was beyond. He wondered what was on the other side of the fence. They were mostly gardens with scraps of lawn. Behind this particular bit of fence was a large pale object. Mr Kelly was surprised that he’d never noticed it before, since it was quite visible above the top of the fence.

  Three girls, holding tight to each other’s hands, slipped through a large hole in the fence. Mr Kelly opened his mouth to call after them, to issue orders, but the wind, strengthening still, flew into his face and he felt his cheeks pressed in with the force of the gale. He finally reached the fence and peered through the splintered panels.

  The children shouted and laughed as the flames flew into the sky. It was a twisting pillar of flames that made the young faces glow and throb to a dusky red. Some of them looked round, as Mr Kelly squeezed through the fence, but most just continued to gaze at the spectacle of the white cone that was beginning to crack. The frame was showing between the empty shapes of the windows that had fallen. The flames crackled and a burst of
fire shot up the centre of the frame, sucked up by the whirling gusts of wind, and the last panes of glass shattered. Thin shards of glass arced out from the exploding window. The children covered their heads and ran. Mr Kelly clapped his hand to his eye.

  There was no blood, no fragment of glass; they could not find anything wrong with Mr Kelly’s eyes at the hospital. They sent him home. Yet, in the days that followed, he could only sit bewildered in his office. He stared at his laptop but the lines of figures on the white screen no longer made any sense. Instead, bursts of colour bloomed behind his eyes. Each time this happened, Mr Kelly flinched. It disturbed his ordered approach to life: to be assailed by the stuff of dreams, to have things unravelling in his mind and claiming his attention when work was to be done.

  “Mr Kelly?” Miss Glacer was faintly concerned, as she nibbled a Ryvita, to see that Mr Kelly was tearing small strips from a printed spreadsheet and arranging them in concentric circles on his desk.

  “Yes, Miss Glacer?” Mr Kelly was smiling as he hauled himself back from the rim of something. There was a rushing sound in his ears and a taste of salt in his mouth. He could see Miss Glacer’s lips moving but her words were drowned out by what he now knew to be the sound of the sea.

  *

  Vernon watched the tower, his refuge, disappearing in smoke and thought how nearly complete it had been. He told himself that it would be possible to rebuild. Then he thought of the back-breaking work, the wasted effort. He was afraid of the hole that was left now that there was nothing and wished that he’d never tried to mould the sand and cement. It was better gone, though the impression of it stayed with him, pressing on his eyes.

  He took his shell, the pink and brown one given him by his uncle, from its place on the shelf. He caressed its familiar symmetry. He wondered how long a shell might last—hundreds of years, perhaps millions, like the skeletons of the dinosaurs. When he was a boy they’d told him to listen for the sound of the sea and he’d listened, entranced. He’d since learned that it was not the sound of the sea inside the shell, but the hollow echo of more mundane sounds.

  “There’s nothing now,” he said to himself, looking at the grey flecks of a drizzle that was just beginning.

  The shell seemed to throb before his eyes as if it was getting bigger in the fading light and he was becoming smaller.

  If he closed his eyes the colours were more intense and other images came into his mind unbidden: twisting spirals that soared up into the cracked blue glaze of a winter sky, the curves and contours of a young woman’s breast and the pale nipple at its summit. He found himself walking across a shiny plateau, so vast that he couldn’t see the limits of it, like an ant crossing a tabletop. Then, he found himself beginning to slide as the surface of the plateau began to undulate, to draw him in.

  The ugly papered walls and the dusty carpet began to fade as if these materials were just a dull layer to be peeled away. The room was getting darker still but the shell by contrast was glowing, gathering the light, and Vernon felt himself becoming a part of the continuing thread of brightness that travelled up into the pale nothingness.

  Made of Glass

  He’d brought his treasures, and spread them on the sun-baked concrete: purple fragments like the severed lobes of ears, others like the blanched lips of drowned sailors. Their salty taste was still in his mouth. He explored the holes that could have been nostrils with his finger, poking it into the clefts and openings.

  Such a lovely lot of shells—she said as she snipped the withered roses off their stems.

  I’ll keep them in my box.

  What box? She winced as the brown thorns caught in her woollen sleeves.

  The one grandpa said he’d give me.

  The old man had been in his garage. He’d let Daniel examine the grubs of screws in their canister. “Biscuits” he’d read. They were all rusty and gummed with old paint. The boy’s fingers became red with the dust of old screws and sticky with cobwebs.

  Crammed on the shelves were the tins of grease and the cans of oil and a cluster of rags. And there was a rack of chisels, screwdrivers and tools for poking out the eyes of small soft animals. And on a high shelf was the box of polished mahogany that once held a silver canteen of cutlery. It had a proper lock with a key and a lozenge of pale veneer on the lid.

  You can have anything for your birthday, anything in the garage, said the old man with a grand gesture and, for a moment, seemed like Solomon with all his wealth.

  That box, the box on the shelf there, could I have that?

  Oh, I expect so. What for?

  Keeping things in.

  The box, Daniel told his cousin, was what he’d asked for. That box in the garage. And then he’d forgotten about it until that afternoon.

  *

  The boy had fallen down a flight of concrete steps and now had a plum-coloured bruise on his elbow.

  My bruise... he said, going to the kitchen door.

  She was grinding something in the glass jug of her mixer. The machine whizzed with such a noise, she didn’t hear at first.

  My bruise, look!

  She touched it with hands on which the skin had grown papery and yellowed like the skin of a plucked chicken.

  We’ll put some butter on that nasty bruise, she said, and began to chop a piece of liver.

  Daniel wondered at the butter and looked, meanwhile, at the kitchen units with their handles of marbled plastic, and the vegetables and the washing machine where she’d got her hand stuck on the spin cycle. He stared at the innocent white enamel of the machine that had tried to wrench the hand off. The thought of her blood made him feel funny, so he hobbled to the kitchen step and sat.

  Why don’t you go and play with your friends? she asked.

  I want to stay here.

  Oh, well then.

  In the sitting room he stroked the cushions and watched the dust settle. On the windowsill, the skeletons of wasps crisped. In the hot afternoons the drowsy clock ticked and she sat back with her head against the antimacassar, rubbing the elbows of her cardigan into holes.

  That box, said the old man coming in from being busy in the garage, I’m in a pickle. His eyes were a milky blue. I’m in a fix, you see.

  The box for my birthday?

  That’s the one. Your cousin had asked for it before you did and I’d told him no. He says it’s not fair because he asked for it first. I shouldn’t have promised it to you. Now, you see, I’m in a pickle.

  So Daniel gave up the box for his cousin—the birthday box of polished wood with the brass lock and key, the box to keep the shells in.

  I’ll remember this, said the old man. I’ll remember that you got me out of a fix—and he placed his large callused hand on the boy’s shoulder and the boy felt the caressing weight of it and the warmth spreading down his arm and into his chest. He felt his heart swell with pride.

  The old man sat in an armchair and read a yellow newspaper that crackled and exploded when he punched the pages, then he shambled over to the TV and twizzled the knobs so that the screen glowed and flickered into life.

  The shirts of the jockeys paraded jerkily through a grey rain. The old man was sitting forward in his chair, as if he was leaning along the tufted mane of the outsider who’d found his form. When the pistol exploded he was on the edge of his seat following the hurtling shapes and slapping his thighs, murmuring through gritted teeth, “Come on...”

  Albert, she said, coming in and scrunching the corner of a tea-towel, the milkman needs paying.

  Outside in the garden, the rose petals fell silently in the borders like crumpled betting slips.

  Just a minute, Connie, grumbled the old man because the outsider, the jockey’s thighs gripping the sweating flanks, was coming up.

  He’s waiting, the milkman—her voice quavered into irritation.

  Just hang on two ticks. The old man’s shanks trembled as he stood.

  The boy knelt in a corner doing something with an empty egg box.

  He needs his
money, do you hear, Albert? How she hated the old man’s grey flannels and his white shirts.

  Albert, the milkman!

  For God’s sake! Can’t I watch the damned race?

  The boy! she hissed.

  Blast the lad, but he went finally, to fetch his wallet from his coat pocket.

  After lunch they slept, the pair of them, mouths gaping, the soft gums and lips grown slack. The old man’s nose hair quivered in his nostrils with the soft flow of air.

  Under their eyelids the eyeballs twitched blindly as they moved through their dreams. The moisture glistened in the slits under the lids. Daniel visited one, then the other, peering as closely as he had examined the limpets that clung in the rock pools. He explored their slumbering forms and grew bored.

  Softly, in his socks, Daniel slipped into the bedroom and approached the shrine with its silvery triptych of bevelled glass, in which his reflection was flanked with two admiring selves, three simpering smiles, three pairs of hands fluttering over the brushes and combs, the crocheted mats and the glass bowl in which a pair of pearl earrings rolled in a nest of hair grips.

  He touched the forbidden objects, picking up a hair clasp in mother-of-pearl, pinning it into his hair, pulling the hair back from his round forehead.

  Fumbling with the handles of the heavy oak drawers he slid open the top drawer. He began to tremble, to shake at the knees. In a case of mottled shagreen was the necklace of glass beads. Against his neck the beads scratched and settled. He put a hand up to his hair, as he’d seen her do, to settle the little comb. He seemed to swim out of the mirror towards himself, transformed momentarily, a pale shimmering creature newly cast from fragments of melted light.

  Daniel moved to the other side of the bedroom and turned back to face himself. He stepped towards the mirror, gliding between the ranks of admirers, nodding first to one side and then the other. There were muted gasps. Daniel has arrived, they whispered.