by Simon Ings
‘Yes.’
‘Go where you like,’ she says. ‘I’m not keeping you here.’
In the kitchen I neck a couple of tablets. Spending so much of my time indoors, in Mandy’s overheated rooms, and breathing the recycled air of the hospital, has given me one head-cold after another. ‘I could take you for lunch.’
Mandy says nothing.
‘In town. I could take you for lunch.’
‘How am I supposed to eat lunch?’
‘The way you usually eat lunch. With your hands. And I can help you. If you get into real difficulties we can ask for a trough.’
Mandy bursts into tears. ‘Why do you have to be such a cunt?’
So I take her to lunch, and that’s when I learn that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who still enjoy playing in puddles and those who never did.
When high water overcomes the Middle, it rises through the pavements everywhere at once. Mandy and I teeter along duckboards down flooded alleys – pausing distracted at this church or that, this bookshop, that stand-up patisserie – and slip, the pair of us, like a couple of drunks, on stone footbridges, their steps edged in marble slick as soap. The water in the city’s culverts is always the same colour, regardless of season, weather, or time of day: the blue-green of plastic garden furniture.
Again and again I crash against the rocks of her resentment.
‘Do you have to keep bumping into me like that?’
‘Do you have to keep pawing me?’
This after she asked me to take her arm. (‘Please. I’m afraid to fall.’)
The water is gone by lunchtime. From the window of the first-floor restaurant I watch as a clear foot of it drains away through tiny sink-holes between the flagstones. The damage done.
Mandy is playing her ‘Come here, go away’ game with the staff. She wants the waiter to dry her shoes. She wants the waiter to bring her shoes back. She wants the waiter to bring her some dry shoes.
In the centre of the square, a man and a woman in smart-casual clothes trot in circles, round and round. Every so often they point at random into the air, as though firing imaginary weapons.
Mandy wants a drink. Mandy wants the waiter to know, me to know, the world to know, that she cannot be expected to sit down to five courses with wet feet and no drink.
Out the window, I watch them playing. The couple’s gestures are ungainly and unpractised. I lean back in my chair, and now I see that I have been watching them through a flaw in the glass; that they are smaller and nearer than I thought. That they are children.
Mandy stands up suddenly. ‘You can have my starter if you want.’
‘What is it?’
‘I’m going.’
‘Why?’
‘All your sniffing and snotting,’ she says. ‘I feel sick.’
It is beginning to dawn on me that Mandy is not actually depressed. She is grumpy. There is a difference, morally.
‘Why can’t you use a handkerchief?’ she says.
It’s after midnight by the time I get home. She’s left everything on, as usual – the television, the fan in the downstairs bathroom. I go around the house, stepping softly, switching off the lights.
Upstairs, I look in on Mandy. She is already asleep. I pull the covers around her and shut her door.
On the terrace, I take out my phone. The air is still, and the canal running past the end of the garden might be a mirror; the lights reflected there are still and absolutely solid. If only the water were closer I might be tempted to throw this useless slab in, just to break the tension.
Dad’s number has been ringing all week, unanswered. Now it comes up unobtainable. I stare at the screen, the number illuminated there, as though it’s the technology that’s betraying me.
More likely Dad, hearing of the accident, has shaken me off at last. Since I texted him from the hospital, six weeks ago, I have heard nothing from him. My emails bounce. My messages vanish into the aether. I can make any number of excuses for him, and that’s exactly what I have been doing, for months now. For years. Maybe his phone was stolen. Maybe he lost my number. After years of widening separation, maybe he is struggling to contact me, just as much as I have been struggling to contact him.
The thing is, I can no longer fool myself. I remember this feeling too well, from our last days at the hotel—
The phone rings. An unfamiliar number. I swipe the call open. ‘Hello.’
‘Conrad.’
I lean back against the wall. ‘Michel.’
‘How are you?’
Still fucked.
Of course, if he knew my real circumstances, if I told him everything, he would know how impossible it is for me to accept his offer. As it is, he cannot understand my reluctance. ‘A couple of weeks, longer if you like, though it’s very cramped here – you’d probably do your nut.’
He has his camera turned off this time. I try to picture him from his first phone call. His orange face aglow. The shapes and shadows round him. He might have been sitting in a toolshed.
‘That’s very generous.’
‘So you’ll come?’
The company I work for is tiny, vigorous and volatile. I’ve been on compassionate leave since the accident. My job is hanging by a thread. I can’t explain this to Michel now, because I’ve already spun him a line about how free-spirited my life is. I can’t turn down his invitation without seeming unfriendly. Though, of course, I can’t go.
‘Hanna would love to meet you,’ he says. ‘Have I told you about Hanna?’
I make the right noises, letting him talk himself out. Behind the sardonic delivery that is his signature, he sounds the happiest I’ve known him. ‘She has this plan for survival. We’re going to live happily ever after.’
‘That’s nice.’
I should tell him about Mandy. Why don’t I tell him? But after all this time – we left school, what, ten years ago? – it feels wrong to burden him with my present horror. I shared too much with him before: things he should never have had to hear. No wonder we’ve hardly spoken since.
‘We have this boat,’ he says.
A boat. Christ. I had had it in my head, until the accident, that I had done pretty well for myself. A place in a pretty, watery, wedding cake-y part of town. Michel’s woman has a boat?
‘We’re going to sail around the world.’
That sort of boat. A working boat that you sail. That’s all right, then. I had visions of them sunbathing in public view in exclusive marinas.
‘We’d love you to see it,’ he says. ‘It’s a bit of a wreck.’
Which reminds me.
‘I’ve not been going out much,’ I say, without thinking. ‘Since the crash.’ I should have said I was back at work. I should have said I was working all hours, trying to catch up on myself.
Stupid. Stupid. Now how am I going to get out of visiting them? Given that I have told him I’m my own master, alone and fancy-free, and on the sick? Of course I cannot go. Shall I tell him that I am incapacitated? That I have lost my face, my hands?
‘Well, how about just for a week, at least?’ he says.
‘I can’t,’ I tell him, increasingly desperate. ‘I can’t.’
Mandy has a touching belief in mornings; in her mind, for a little while at least, they have the power to set all things to rights. ‘Come on in,’ she says. ‘The door’s not locked.’
She’s in the bath. The water’s heat has flushed her scars: her face is edged and crazed, more shattered than torn.
‘I’ll wash your back.’
She’s put on weight, slumped here, undone, day after day in these white rooms. Slim pads of fat give under my fingers as I work soap along her spine.
‘That’s nice.’
‘I’ll do your hair.’
She turns, her face sliced up into a smile. ‘You do too much for me.’
She slides deeper into the water, raises her legs out of the water, and fetches me the shampoo from the shelf behind the bath. I take the pi
nk bottle from between her clamped feet, my throat in spasm, and she shimmies herself upright again. While I work the shampoo through her hair she raises her knees and rubs her stumps against them, washing them. A smell rises. Soap and roses.
‘Who was it on the phone last night?’
Falling in love with a person is hard. Falling in love with a world is easy. Confusing the two loves is easier still. I spend the day wandering round the house in mourning for it all. Mandy’s kitchen. Mandy’s underwear. Mandy’s pillows and shoes. I love her scarves and her seven different kinds of toothpaste (a flavour for each day of the week). I love those little blue bottles of essential oils gathering dust on her bathroom shelf. I was always a sucker for Mandy’s world. Her visits to out-of-the-way antique shops. Her cutlery drawer, every knife and fork a ‘piece’. Wine glasses from an arcade near the Palace of Sports. Cushions from a woman who lives on one of the old lime tree avenues in the Turkish quarter. In Mandy’s world, everything has an aesthetic value. The humblest objects acquire a small but telling erotic charge.
Packing is the work of a moment. Laptop and charger, a couple of jumpers, underwear, jeans. Mandy has a hospital appointment this morning. She’s back from her fitting at two. I haven’t got long. Every time a taxi passes outside the window, my heart gives a tiny jolt.
It’s all right. There is time. I wonder if Mandy’s hands are dexterous enough yet to allow her to unlock her front door? They must be. She managed all right the day she walked out on me in the restaurant. Only that was a Tuesday. Maybe the cleaner was in.
I don’t know.
Anyway, I should phone her, if only to warn her, to tell her I’m gone.
FOUR
At its grandest, the north-coast highway is a monster. Its four-lane carriageways are barely enough to feed and relieve the half-dozen ferry and container ports that have spread – a slow and steady flood of glass and steel – to fill the mouths of every valley, making islands of a dozen basalt hills.
To the east, the landscape is economically unimportant and much less dramatic, and the road, having expended its strength on valley-spanning ribcage viaducts and swooping white-tiled tunnels, withers at last to a tiny, chicaned, suburban memory of itself. A main road. A high street. A bus route. At each junction, mini-roundabouts form pronounced bulges.
There is not much else to see. A shingle bank blocks my view of the waves. There are some shops – an uneasy mix of tourist services and struggling convenience stores. Hair Trendz. Raz the Newsagent. Artisanal Fruit Beer & Cheese for that ‘Tasty Gift’.
This is as far as the national rail network will take me. The regular railway loops south from here, its banked-up rail bed forcing the narrow-gauge local service into a weed-choked alley, embankments on the landward side and a sloping sea-wall on the other. Dead turfs and twigs poke up through its concrete honeycomb. A solitary string of barbed wire makes a notional boundary between the two railways, the big and the small.
There is a café at the station, its chunky pine furniture slathered over with a glassy, polyurethane varnish. At the back of the café is a flight of stairs leading to a model railway exhibition. A 00 gauge layout runs round three walls. In the centre, vitrines display larger, stripped-down engines and mechanical toys. Not all of them are very old. Some I recognise from my childhood. I pause to study a model circus, with cages for the lions, and slop buckets hung on little hooks outside the cages, and caravans with washing lines strung between them, and a make-up tent. The flaps are tied back and there is light inside. I hunker down to see in. A female clown is preparing her face in front of a mirrored make-up table. Her frown is illuminated by light thrown from tiny bulbs embedded in the frame of her mirror.
I stand up quickly, self-conscious, the butt of an obscure cosmic joke.
Wooden steps and boxes bring small children up to the height of the railway’s lower reaches, where a variety of goods trains, car transporters, tanker trucks and passenger locomotives weave in and out of sidings and through plaster-of-Paris tunnels, braking and accelerating with an unnatural facility. Clear panels protect the exhibit from curious fingers. Here and there, where the light hits it at an angle, you can see, printed on the glass, the handprint of a child.
The railway crosses a rugged, stepped landscape, rising in one place almost to the bobbly-papered ceiling. (In one out-of-the-way corner, small figures hung on thread simulate the plight of climbers attempting a dangerous, off-width chimney on lichenous rock.)
The trains weave around each other, stop at red signals, go at green. (The abrupt physics of this miniature world is its only unavoidable shortcoming.) The choreography is complex and contingent, signals responding to signals. I wonder if the pattern ever repeats itself. The exhibit may be self-organising, not operating according to some master timetable but to regular readings of its own internal state. Anyway it runs so seamlessly, the eye tires of it in the end. The trains will run and stop and run again as the stars will rise and set, interminably. The rest of the diorama is, by contrast, steeped in incident and drama. True, its occupants – people, road vehicles and animals – are frozen in place. But this actually heightens the drama, bringing to mind scenes glimpsed from a speeding train carriage.
A car has crashed into a safety barrier on a narrow mountain switchback. Witnesses are running up the hill, around the blind bend, to warn on-coming drivers and prevent more collisions.
In the valley below, a lorry driver rests his arm on the sill of his side window as he waits for a flock of sheep to cross a ford. The livery on his truck is written in Cyrillic. He has driven a long way – is he going to fall asleep at the wheel?
At the entrance of a small rural station, a man and a woman are embracing a child. She stands beside a small leather trunk, and wears a daypack, from which merges the head of a teddy bear (or it might be a rabbit). The parents are not so encumbered; they have come to wave the child off. Where is she going? To school? To stay with a grumpy lone relative, high in the papier maché mountains?
Outside, a steam whistle blows. I glance at my watch and hurry down the stairs, out of the cafe and down the concrete ramp to the platforms of the narrow-gauge service. A train is pulling out of the station. The locomotive is serious enough: its jet-black body is as long and sleek as a classic sports car. It is not a toy. Still, it only comes up as high as my chest. The top of the driver’s head is just visible above a polished cowling as he passes by. He is sitting on a padded leather or vinyl bench seat directly behind the boiler. Steam tickles my ankles. Crisp clouds of water vapour obscure the platform for a split second, boiling into the air even as they form. Coaches rumble by. These are taller and wider than the locomotive. It is possible to sit two abreast in them. Some coaches are open, others are fully fitted, with brass-handled doors and sliding windows. A baggage car passes, stuffed with bicycles. In their off-scale compartment, the bicycles look gigantic.
Children wave at me as their coach trundles by. I grin back at them but I keep my hands in my pockets, reluctant to commit myself to the game. The train clears the station and there is Michel, on the platform opposite, looking – in his donkey jacket and cracked DMs – as though he has just stepped out of a protest march. He’s studying another locomotive, on the other side of the far platform. This one is bottle green, with polished pipes and spoked iron wheels, whose rims and details are picked out in red enamel. It is prettier than the engine that just left, and its lines are less muscular. An engineer is polishing its controls with a rag.
Michel straightens up, turns and sees me. He has lost his runner’s poise. He has put on muscle. An all-weather tan has darkened his already dark complexion – he looks like a Romany gypsy in an old print. At the same time, he has acquired a new brightness. A thin beard softens the mournful line of his mouth. His hairline is already receding; and he is smiling. He never used to smile so readily. God help me, he’s happy. He shines with it.
I look for a way to cross over. There is a footbridge, back near the café, but there are no
trains at the moment, no squeals of wheel on rail, and the platforms themselves are toy things; they stand barely a foot above the rail beds. Michel waves me over. The engineer behind him frowns but says nothing, just carries on rubbing. I cross the rail bed and step up onto the opposite platform.
‘It’s good to see you.’ He embraces me. ‘Bloody hell.’ He finds us an empty carriage. We sit opposite each other, my kit bag perched on end in the seat next to me.
We sit and we talk; we say the things people usually say, but these pleasantries – ‘Smooth journey?’ ‘How are you?’ – leave less of a mental trace on me than the fact of our proximity. Michel’s presence is like a scent. It presses against me, heavy with memory, as we wait for this pretty green engine to pull us east, towards the shingle banks and the sea.
FIVE
Dad had expected Mum to take charge of the look of the hotel, and fill it with the things she made. Curtains, cushions, hand-printed wallpapers, framed pieces. Mum couldn’t sell for toffee, but she had skill, a good eye. Instead she spent her whole time looking after me. I have no memory of her doing anything for the hotel beyond a bit of absenteeism cover here and there. She ran into town for supplies if an order fell through. She handled the bookings when our manager went to pick up his daughter Gabby from school. She served at the bar, but only when Dad wasn’t around. (Meeting her for the first time, you wouldn’t say she was a friendly person.)
So the whole weight of running and furnishing and maintaining the hotel fell to Dad. It was done out in his style, not hers. Not that he really had a style. He had interests. Hobbies.
He collected soldiers. Some were made of glue and sawdust. The others were lead, hollowcast, slush aluminium. There were army men too: generic green plastic, lightweight and homogenous, fitted out for abstract war.
Soldiers skirmished along the edges of shelves, and over the deep, white-gloss windowsills at the back of the house. They sidled along door frames and dadoes and square-cut skirting boards. They balanced precariously on the tops of framed prints. Once a room was freshly made up, Dad would go in and prop a soldier up under the desk lamps, hide another among the stalks of dead flower arrangements. He imagined he was creating witty arrangements – talking points. Really he was playing with them. A mortar with a two-man crew. A despatch rider on a motorcycle. A motorcycle with a sidecar. A scout car with a mounted machine gun.