by Jonathan Coe
This last one was a close-up, and was the most unsettling. His face was turned partly away from the camera, looking downwards, lost in anxious thought. He was chewing nervously on the knuckle of his thumb. Here, already, he looked like a man in torment, as if all too aware that the image he was presenting to the world was a false one; that the truth behind it was darker, more dangerous, and too painful to confront. This was definitely the one – this was the picture that I found so disturbing. But why should it affect me that way?
Then it dawned on me. Of course – it was obvious, now that I’d noticed it.
He was the spitting image of my father.
Watford–Reading
6
I missed her.
Already I missed her.
Poppy had gone fifteen minutes ago and already I missed her dreadfully.
Should I read anything into the fact that she hadn’t wanted to come and have a coffee with me? Of course not. She’d had a long flight, and she was tired, and she wanted to get home. We’d said goodbye in the baggage reclaim area. A bad place to say goodbye. Noisy, chaotic, oppressive. But she only had hand luggage, and I had to wait for my case to come up on the carousel, so that was where it had to be, our goodbye. After that, I collected my case, wheeled it outside, saw the queue for taxis (which was at least fifty-strong) and wheeled it back in again.
I took the escalator up to the departures lounge and bought myself a cappuccino. I think it was the hottest drink I had ever been served in my life. Twenty minutes passed before I even dared to put my lips to it. In the meantime I watched the comings and goings of the other passengers. Nobody, apart from me, seemed to be travelling alone. This can’t have been true, objectively speaking, but it was how things appeared that morning. After about ten minutes a man sat at the table next to mine. He looked roughly my age, apart from the fact that his hair was grey, almost white; and he was alone, so I was almost on the point of saying something to him, just for the relief of talking to someone again, but then his wife and two daughters turned up. The two daughters were very pretty. I guessed that the younger one was about eight, the older one twelve or thirteen – close to Lucy’s age. His daughters were very pale; in fact the whole family was very pale. I listened in to their conversation for a little while. He was going to Moscow for a few days, and his family had come to see him off. He sounded quite nervous about this trip, for some reason, but his wife was trying to be reassuring about it, and kept saying things like, ‘You’ve done this sort of thing dozens of times before.’ He mentioned that he was going to have to give lots of interviews, and I wondered if he might be famous, but I didn’t recognize him. They left after another ten minutes or so.
My cappuccino was still too hot to drink. I picked up my mobile phone and retrieved Poppy’s number from the memory and looked at it. I wished I’d been able to take a picture of her before she left, but I knew that it would have felt like a weird favour to ask. It would have put her off. So instead, all I had was her mobile number. A face, a personality, a pair of lively eyes, a body, a human being, all reduced to eleven digits on a screen. All somehow contained in that magical combination of numbers. Better than nothing, at any rate. At least I had a means of contacting her. At least Poppy was in my life, now.
I took a tentative sip of my cappuccino, which had been served to me twenty-five minutes earlier, recoiled as the still-scalding liquid sent scorching needles of pain through my lips, tongue and the roof of my mouth, and gave it up as a bad job. I dragged my suitcase out from under the table and went to try my luck with the taxi queue again.
It was about nine o’clock in the morning as I approached home. I was slumped in the back of a taxi, looking out at the monochrome grimness of urban Hertfordshire through sleepy eyes. It was the third week of February 2009, the skies were thick with cloud and to me, that morning, the world had never looked greyer, or felt chillier. I thought about the country I had left behind: so full of warmth, colour, vitality. The rich blue of the summer skies over Sydney; the dazzling play of light on the harbour waters. And now this. Watford, windswept and rainy.
‘Just drop me here, will you?’ I said to the taxi driver.
He looked at me in some puzzlement as I hauled my suitcase out of the front of the cab, and paid him his fare (fifty pounds, plus tip). But I knew – even though it was just putting off the evil moment – that I couldn’t go home just yet. I still needed a little more time to gather my strength. So I wheeled my case behind me again as I turned left off the Lower High Street and walked up Watford Field Road. When I reached the Field itself, I sank down on to a bench. The wooden slats were wet and I could feel the dampness seeping through my trousers and underpants and into my skin. It didn’t matter. My house was only about half a mile’s walk from here, and I would go there in a few minutes; but in the meantime, I just wanted to sit, and think, and watch the people walking by on their way to work – to check, I suppose, that I still felt some kind of bond with these people: my fellow humans, my fellow Britons, my fellow Watfordians.
It was tough going.
Someone must have passed by my bench every thirty seconds or so, but nobody said hello, or nodded, or made eye-contact. In fact, every time I tried to make eye-contact, or looked as though I might be about to speak to them, they would look away, hurriedly and pointedly, and quicken their step. You might have thought this would be especially true of the women, but it wasn’t – the men looked just as alarmed at the prospect that a stranger might be trying to engage with them, even fleetingly. It was sobering to see how even the little spark of common humanity I was trying to ignite between us made them panic, turn tail and flee.
For those who don’t know Watford Field, it’s a scrap of parkland, probably no more than about 200 yards along each side, not far from the main thoroughfares of Waterfields Way and Wiggenhall Road, so that the traffic noise is pretty much constant. It’s not exactly an oasis but I suppose that any green space to which you can beat a retreat is to be valued these days. After a while I began to feel oddly settled there, that morning, and despite the cold and the damp I sat there for much longer than I’d been intending. As it got later, of course, fewer and fewer people seemed to pass by. Soon it got to the point where I hadn’t seen a soul for ten minutes. And it was more than an hour since I’d spoken to anyone – if you can count my mumbled farewells to the taxi driver as speaking, in any meaningful sense. It was probably time to give up and face the forbidding emptiness of my house.
Then a man appeared, rounding the corner from Farthing Close and coming towards me. And there was something in the uncertainty of his progress, the hesitancy of his bearing, that made me think that this might be the one. He was probably in his early twenties, wearing a navy-blue fleece and stonewashed drainpipe jeans. He had a shock of thick, curly black hair and what seemed to be the beginnings of a moustache – tentative, like everything else about him. He was looking around him in apparent bewilderment, and twice, before he reached my bench, he stopped and turned, and looked into the distance, as if checking out alternative roads he might have taken. Obviously he was lost. Yes, that was it – he was lost! And what did people do when they were lost? They stopped to ask for directions. That was what he was going to do. He was probably trying to get to the railway station on the High Street. Or maybe the General Hospital. Both were nearby. He was going to ask me how to get there, and we were going to have a conversation. I could even imagine how the conversation would go. Even before he had spoken to me, I was rehearsing it in my head. ‘Where are you trying to get to, mate? The station? Well, High Street station is just round the corner, but if you’re heading for London you’ll be better off going to Watford Junction. About ten, fifteen minutes from here. Keep going straight down this road – back towards the Lower High Street – then hang a left and keep straight on till you get to the big junction with the ring road …’
I could hear his footsteps now, accelerating rapidly, and also his breathing, which was irregular and urgent. I saw that
he had nearly reached me. And that he wasn’t looking quite as friendly as I thought he would.
‘Then you cross the ring road,’ I silently continued, none the less, ‘and you go past the entrance to the Harlequin on your right, and the big Waterstone’s …’
‘Give me your phone.’
The voice in my head ceased abruptly.
‘What?’
I looked up and saw him glaring down at me, his face a compound of malevolence and panic.
‘Give me your fucking phone. Right now.’
Without another word I stuffed my hand into my trouser pocket and tried to extricate my mobile. The trousers were tight and it wasn’t easy.
‘Sorry about this,’ I said, wriggling and struggling. ‘It doesn’t seem to want to come.’
‘Don’t look at me!’ the man shouted. (Actually he seemed more like a boy.) ‘Don’t look at my face!’
I’d almost managed to extract the phone from my pocket. It was ironic: my last model had been a super slimline Nokia which would have slipped out easily. I’d gone for this more chunky Sony Ericsson because it was better for playing mp3s. I didn’t think it was appropriate to explain this right now, though.
‘Here you are,’ I said, and handed him the mobile. He snatched it off me violently. ‘Was there anything else you wanted – I mean like … cash, credit cards … ?’
‘Fuck you!’ he shouted, and ran off down Farthing Way, in the same direction from which he’d come.
It had all happened in a few seconds. I flopped back down on the bench and watched his receding figure. I was shaking slightly, but soon became calm again. My first instinct was to dial 999 and call for the police, but then I realized I no longer had a phone to do it on. My second instinct was to start wheeling my suitcase back towards my house, stopping at the convenience store on the way so that I could buy some milk and make myself a cup of tea when I got there. Strangely, instead of worrying too much about the loss of my phone – which was insured against theft, at any rate – I was more disappointed that my long-awaited moment of human contact hadn’t quite panned out the way I’d been hoping.
Just then, I heard footsteps approaching again. Running, this time. And the same panting, irregular breath. It was my mugger. He ran straight past my bench, ignoring me, then stopped suddenly, looked this way and that, and ran a hand through his hair.
‘Shit,’ he was saying. ‘Shit!’
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.
He wheeled round.
‘Uh?’
He looked at me more closely and registered, I think, for the first time, that I was the same person whose phone he had just stolen.
‘What’s the matter?’ I repeated.
It took him another few seconds to assess the situation and to decide that I was not just trying to wind him up. Then he said: ‘I’m lost, man. I’m completely fucking lost. Which way’s the station from here?’
My heart swelled when I heard these words.
‘Well there are two stations. Where are you trying to get to?’
‘Central London, man. I’ve got to get back to London pronto.’
‘Then your best bet is Watford Junction. It’s about ten, fifteen minutes from here. Keep going straight down this road – back towards the Lower High Street – then hang a left and keep straight on till you get to the big junction with the ring road …’
‘The ring road, yeah? Where all the traffic lights are.’
‘That’s right. Then you cross the ring road, and you go past the entrance to the Harlequin on your right, and the big Waterstone’s …’
‘OK – OK – I know the Harlequin, I know my way from there. That’s fine, man. That’s great. I’m sorted.’
‘Pleased to be of help,’ I said, smiling at him directly now – but this was a mistake, because it just made him scream, ‘And don’t look at my face, man, don’t you dare look at my fucking face!’ before turning and running at an athlete’s sprint towards the edge of the Field and the road that led down to Lower High Street.
I must have been seriously jet-lagged, because I wasn’t thinking straight. As I trudged over to the convenience store, all I could think about the mugging was ‘This will make a good story to tell to Poppy’, and in fact I was so pleased to have this story to tell her, so pleased to have a ready excuse for contacting her this morning, that I spent the time quite happily composing a quirky, downbeat text message about the episode in my head. It wasn’t until I reached the store and rested my suitcase outside that I realized I couldn’t send her a text message, because I no longer had my phone, and also, because I no longer had my phone, I no longer had her number, or any means of contacting her.
So, that was that.
I went inside to buy the milk.
7
As I pushed open the front door of my house, I expected to feel the dead weight of piles of junk mail behind it. But there wasn’t that much. Maybe a dozen envelopes. To be honest, I would have expected more than that, after an absence of three weeks.
Leaving my suitcase in the hall, I scooped up the letters and carried them into the sitting room. It was freezing in there. Needless to say, there was no sound of a radio drifting in from the kitchen, no smell of freshly brewed coffee wafting through the hall. Caroline and Lucy were – as I’d known they would be – more than 200 miles away. Maybe they had written one of these letters, all the same. When they first went away, Lucy used to write to me quite often – every couple of weeks or so – usually enclosing some drawing, or collage, or piece of writing that she’d done at school. But the letters had been slowing down lately. I think the last time I’d received one had been in November. Let me see … I skimmed through the envelopes, and could quickly see that there was nothing from her. Three credit card bills. Letters from gas and electricity suppliers touting for business. Bank statements, mobile phone bills. The usual crap. Nothing of interest there at all.
I went into the kitchen to turn the heating on, and boil the kettle, and while I was there I glanced at the answering machine mounted on the wall. It blinked a number back at me. ‘Five’. Five phone messages, while I’d been away for almost a month? This was ridiculous. Did I dare to listen to them?
While I was plucking up courage, I went upstairs and into the back bedroom to boot up my computer. The trick, as always, was to walk into the room and do whatever I had to do there without really looking around me. I’d become quite good at it by now. It had to be done this way, because this bedroom used to be Lucy’s. The sensible thing would have been to redecorate it after she and Caroline had moved out, but I hadn’t been able to face doing that – not just yet. In the meantime, it still had the pink girly wallpaper that she used to like, and the Blu-Tack marks on the wall where she used to stick all the posters from her animal magazines – big close-ups of sleeping hamsters and impossibly cute wombats and things like that. Luckily the posters themselves were gone. But the wallpaper itself was a painful reminder. Maybe this was the week I should do something about it. There was no need to strip it off, I could just paint over it – three or four coats of brilliant white emulsion ought to be enough to hide the flowery pattern. In the meantime, I just looked straight ahead of me, limited my field of vision to the things I was meant to be concentrating upon. It was easier that way.
Back in the kitchen, I made a mug of strong tea and took a couple of sips before pressing the ‘Play’ button on the answering machine. But my mood of trembling anticipation was short-lived. There was a message from my employer, reminding me to come in for a final meeting with the Occupational Health Officer in a few days’ time. There were two messages from my dentist: an automated one, reminding me of my appointment for a check-up two weeks earlier (which I had forgotten all about) and one from a real person, left the following day, asking me why I’d failed to turn up, and reminding me that I would have to pay for the check-up anyway. Then there were two blank messages, consisting simply of long electronic beeps followed by the noise of somebody hanging up. One
of these might have been from Caroline, of course, but I couldn’t dial 1471 to find out, because both of these calls pre-dated the messages from my dentist.
So much for the telephone.
Well, maybe Facebook would cheer me up. I had more than seventy friends on Facebook, after all. Surely that must have created some activity while I’d been away. I took my tea upstairs, settled down in front of the computer and logged in to my home page.
Nothing.
I stared at the screen in shock. Not a single friend had sent me a message or posted anything on my wall in the last month. If the evidence was to be believed, in other words, not one of those seventy people had thought of me once during my absence.
My stomach felt suddenly hollow. My eyes started to sting: I could feel tears coming. This was worse than I could possibly have imagined.
There was only one thing left: email. Could I bear to open Outlook Express? What if my inbox told the same story?
My fingers moved mechanically, robotically across the keyboard. I clutched the mouse in my right hand and never took my eyes off the screen as it filled first with the programme’s welcome message, and then with the subject headers of emails previously received. Slowly, my heart thumping, a pit of dread opening up in my abdomen, I moved the cursor across the screen and clicked on the fateful button: ‘Send/Receive’.
The dialogue box appeared. The progress messages flashed up: Finding Host. Connected. Authorizing. Connected. Then a few seconds’ pause, while the computer seemed to be teasing me, relishing my torment, until – YES! – joy, oh, joy – ‘Receiving list of messages from server’, and – I could hardly believe this – the first message came flagged with the astonishing announcement, ‘Receiving Message 1 of 137’.