by Simon Ings
Agnes has settled back to sleep. I’m impressed. I would have thought the big bad city would have given her nightmares.
Their house is enclaved now. I was there last month, picking up Agnes for a date. (It was a kind of date. A meal, a show. It was fun. It was a glimpse of what the future Agnes ought to be like, unless her parents’ separation ruins things for her.)
I remember I drove up to the house and there was this flimsy plastic barricade across their road. Pointless. A strong gust of wind would rip it off. That or the bull-bars of a speeding 4by4. There was a gatehouse next to it, and a kid slumped there in the uniform, several sizes too big, of a D-list private security company.
‘How long’s this been here?’ I asked him, jovial enough. Breaking the ice.
‘Who was it you wanted?’
There were no special signs of decline there – nothing obvious to explain the barrier. Presumably there are more break-ins there now, but that’s true everywhere. The gate is best understood as a gesture – a community’s more or less neurotic response to the gathering general threat.
Anyway I parked up below the house. When I first came here the view of the mountains had impressed me into thinking I had fallen into a pocket of genuine countryside, but now I saw that the place was not so very different from the housing estate that had haunted my childhood. It was simply better located, more expansive, its gardens concealed behind high hedges, with lines of mature trees preserved here and there, to hint at woods long since cut down. How many children’s memories did this place erase, I wonder?
I sit up in bed again. Spring up, heart hammering.
It’s just after dawn – whatever magic there was has gone out of the air, but it’s still not properly light. I pad over to the light switch, shivering. It occurs to me that I am naked. Hanna could walk in. Agnes. And the kitchen blinds are open. Fuck it. Snap. And into bed again. Well, couch. Jesus, it’s cold.
It’s not the light has woken me, or the cold. It’s the estate. The memories it has not quite erased. That sound: Click-clack.
Was it Michel that night, watching me throw my mother away? Absurd. Taking photographs? No. This is the logic of nightmare – a welling paranoia that, given its head, could swallow everything and everyone.
But even as I’m rejecting the idea – the product of a troubled night, no more, a coincidence – I remember something else.
The riverbank. Michel’s ring of fridges. His redoubt. The voyage. ‘We’re sailing round the world.’ Hanna’s skin glowing. Michel’s lined and weathered face, in the low light of the living room, looking like something made out of wood.
Last year I told Bryon Vaux about my mother. He offered to help me find out about her. He walked me out of his office and Michel was there in the lobby waiting to talk to him. I hadn’t seen him in a while. ‘Conrad. Hi.’ He shook my hand. His skin was rough and broken. He was working with his hands.
I tug my jeans on and go through to the bedroom. Hanna and Agnes are awake, chatting.
‘Hanna. I think I know where he goes.’
So, after a gap of twenty years, I find myself going home, back to the town I grew up in.
The weather is getting worse by the hour. The rain comes down in sheets. The radio is a mess of flood warnings and contradictory travel advice. The traffic piles itself upon itself, and all three lanes set solid, trapping me in a tailback that streams up the hill in a red-grey blur. Emergency vehicles shoot past on the hard shoulder, lights showering the rain-mapped glass.
Another 4by4 goes by on the inside. Sod it. I turn the wheel.
The junction is jammed. Three hundred yards from the turn-off I join a line of cars waiting on the hard shoulder. Beside me, virtually the whole slow lane is signalling. It takes me twenty minutes to leave the motorway, and while I’m shunting and braking, the great lid of the sky begins to break up. Its uniform grey clumps into bricks and anvils that catch the late morning light. Sunlight floods the windscreen and the rain comes down harder than ever, the clouds wringing themselves out like rags.
It’s mid-afternoon by the time I find a way through the outskirts of town. I park up in a crescent of new houses.
The road into the centre is closed to traffic. I walk along its dotted white line. Even that paltry transgression – stepping where cars would normally run – feels strange to me. I wonder at myself and my own absurdity. I have spent too long in the city, obeying its tight rules of conduct, stepping out its precise, pedestrian dances.
Floodwaters have swept trash in piles against garden walls. Amongst the leaf-litter and twigs are fragments of man-made stuff. Smashed shelving, squares of plywood, lolly sticks, boxes, cartons, pallets. Crisp packets. Styrofoam. Someone is wrestling a sofa chair through their front door. The chair was white once, and from the state of the fabric – the dark line running just below the level of its arms – you can see how high the water came. The sofa falls out into the front garden. A man follows it out. His shirt is smothered in dirt. Perhaps the waters rose around him, too. I imagine him rooted to the spot, vanishing, inch by inch, under a cold, thin slurry.
He drags his sofa chair over and leans it against his garden wall. He kneels, gets his weight under it, and heaves it over the wall onto the pavement. He comes out through the garden gate and drags the chair towards a flatbed truck piled with swollen hardboard and peeling kitchen units. I go to help him.
He waves me away. ‘I wouldn’t, mate. Your clothes.’
So I stand there, watching him work.
Eventually I come to an area of standing water. It’s not deep. I wade through it. My feet are wet through anyway; it doesn’t make any difference. There are shops, and a woman in a headscarf is using a broom to sweep water the colour of chocolate out of her front door and onto the pavement. In the road is a pile of ruined stock. Cardboard boxes bursting with rice. Open boxes full of chocolate bars, leaves and toilet tissue. I catch the woman’s eye, and look away.
Men in high-vis vests sweep water off the pavements and into the roads. The water spills back behind them as they go. They look absurd, trying to Canute the waves like this, but it’s not the water they’re trying to sweep away but the filth and fragments the water has deposited everywhere.
A side road rises and turns right, along the river. All along the embankment, people stand watching. The flow, enormously swollen, has swept the bridge away. Two large piles of fallen masonry break the surface of the water, but most of the bridge is hidden beneath the flood. You can tell it’s there because of the smooth whaleback shapes the water makes, and the rills of foaming stuff in the lee of each bulge. Here and there, rafts of leaf-litter and rubbish shoot past. They touch and drift apart, touching twiggy arms.
Toward the centre of town, a couple are dumping the contents of their home into a skip. The man comes out with a plastic box piled with toys. A boy runs out after him. He’s wearing galoshes and a bright red mackintosh. He wants something from the box. A woman comes out and catches him by the arm.
‘Conrad.’
He’s by my side.
‘Fuck’s sake, Michel.’
‘I startled you.’
‘Fuck’s sake.’
We retrace my steps back to the main road. Michel is looking well but weathered. His hair is turning grey – unless, of course, it’s dust from the sander (old gel coat powder tightening across his skin . . .). There’s a camera around his neck, of course. There usually is. And after all, this is a flood. A real flood. Michel, the bard of apocalypses, has a duty to his readership to get the details right. I ask him, ‘Where shall we go?’
‘Sand Lane, of course.’
‘How are we going to get there?’
‘What do you mean, how are we going to get there? We’re going there.’
‘But it’s on the other side of the river.’
Michel frowns at me. ‘What are you talking about, Conrad? It’s that way.’ He points, between buildings I do not recognise, new buildings, new developments, a new town. He’s been here
more recently than I have, many times, checking in on his mother. He knows this place. His mental maps of it are up to date.
Mine aren’t. This may as well be a new town, for all I remember. This is not my birthplace. I was never here.
But the hotel is still standing, my old home, and it’s still in good order. It’s not a hotel any more. I’m not sure what it is. There is a new fence, and a wrought-iron gate. A sign on the retaining wall sports the logo of a high street bank.
The housing estate has declined. There are a lot of unroadworthy vehicles hidden under tarpaulins or simply left to rust on the verges and in gardens overgrown with weeds. The gardens have grown up at last, but they are straggly, untidy. The place has reached old age without acquiring maturity. It still looks as though it was thrown together yesterday – then doused in neglect.
Poppy’s garden, with its dwarf this and dwarf that and miniature the other, is still the neatest of the lot; she must police it from beyond the grave.
In order to wrap up Poppy’s affairs, Michel needs to go through her papers. First, of course, he has to find them. This is not going to be easy. Poppy was always putting things away in safe places. I remember I ran into her one time she was visiting Michel at university. She said she had some money to give him. Off she went to the toilet. She had it hidden in her knickers. Michel unlocks the front door. ‘Check for loose floorboards, for papers stuck in books.’ I imagine us dressed in paramilitary black leather, hunting out seditious literature behind skirting boards and inside ceiling lamps.
A local house-clearing firm has been booked for the middle of the week to take away the furniture. Poppy used to make a big production out of it, but all in all it’s very poor stuff.
I find instant coffee in the cupboard. The kettle is so clean, so polished, it might have been unboxed yesterday. We stand in the lounge, sipping instant coffee. Neither of us dares to sit on Poppy’s sofa.
‘Has Hanna told you we’re separating?’
‘I can’t think why.’
‘It’s not what you think.’
What do I think? What am I supposed to think? ‘What about Agnes?’
‘I’m doing this for her.’
‘Doing what? Quitting? Disappearing? She misses you.’
‘I’m around.’ He sounds very sure of himself. I know this confidence. I have heard it before, and have fallen under its spell. Michel has a project. ‘Let’s look at your hands.’
‘What?’
‘Come on, Mick.’ I take his coffee cup off him and set it down in the sink. ‘Show me your hands.’
He holds them out for me. He smiles.
‘Christ, Michel. What is it? What are you building? A ship?’
‘Why build a boat when the sea will come for you?’
‘Where is it?’
‘Near.’
‘Will you show me?’
He hesitates, caught between his self-myth – the brave survivor, girding himself for the war of all against all – and his pride. Even his most committed and literal-minded fans cannot know, as I know, the deep seriousness that underlies Mick’s stories of the Fall. At last, he shakes his head. ‘Some other time.’
How casually we talk of this! But I have lived with Michel’s project all my life. His determination to survive. It’s nothing new. Nothing strange. He was always going to do this. He was always going to build this. It was only ever a question of when.
Michel wants to get up in the loft straight away. He finds the garage key in the drawer of the telephone table. He wrestles the ladder out from behind buckets and bags of garden fertiliser and carries it into the house. It’s as well that Poppy’s not around to see this. ‘I’m not having you clambering about the loft. I’m not having you up there stamping about in my things!’
The loft hatch is in the hall, directly in front of the frosted-glass kitchen door. The hall is only just wide enough for the stepladder. I can’t get past. The old claustrophobia grabs me suddenly. It is daunting to think of Michel living out his entire childhood in these few, cell-like rooms. ‘How is it up there?’
‘There’s not much.’ Michel is disappointed. He is moving directly over my head and through the ceiling, his shuffling sounds hollow and at the same time oddly intimate – a scratching in the ear.
‘Shall I come up?’
‘If you like. There’s not a lot of room.’
I need the toilet first. I’d forgotten how bloody small the lavatory is – the size of those cells you see in dungeon attractions, meant to contort the body of the inmate before he’s hauled off to interrogation.
The toilet roll holder is mounted on the wall on my right. It is a simple chrome bracket. A sprung plastic rod holds the toilet roll in place. On the wall, above and to the left, there is a blemish. I remember it. It is, as far as I know, the only blemish in the whole, seamlessly white house.
It must have come from the rag of the roller. The fleece. I’m not sure, though; it looks more like a piece of paper. It’s no bigger than the rim of a baby’s fingernail and it’s folded over itself at right-angles to make a circumflex or tail-less arrow, pointing towards the corner of the skirting board. I remember, every day, several times a day, I would stare at this blemish as though it were a sign, pointing me the way out of this place.
I get my thumbnail under the blemish and dig in. The fleck slides under my nail, into the quick, hurting me, and a spot of pinkish gray plaster appears on the wall.
Something pops. A loud, hollow sound, followed by a rain of sand. Michel’s voice cuts sharply through. ‘Fuck.’
I finish up on the toilet and hurry out. ‘Michel?’
A sound of tearing cardboard.
‘Shit.’
Michel has knocked a hole in the ceiling of the dining room – not with ‘great big feet’ after all, but with the corner of a cardboard box. It looks as if the whole thing may fall through. I stand well clear. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Fucking stupid!’
‘What?’
‘There are boxes here stuffed so full you can’t lift them. What’s the point of that?’
‘Are you all right.’
‘Yes, yes, I’m fine. Shit.’
The living room table is smothered in plaster fragments and dust. I run my finger through it. Above me, Michel wrestles the box back through the gap. Dust rains down. I stand back, heels crunching plaster into the dog-hair-thin pile of the floor tiles. ‘Do you need a hand?’
He doesn’t reply, so I go to the dining room and open the drinks cabinet.
There are bottles in here I remember from my youth. Melon liqueur, blended whisky, various fruit ‘creams’. Small, pretty, stemless glasses with coloured bands round the outside. I pour half a glass of sherry, open a bottle of chocolate liqueur, and upend it to see what, if anything, comes out. A brownish syrup winds its way through the sherry.
I knock it back.
I take a second glass out of the cabinet, a half-bottle of coffee liqueur and an unopened schnapps. There’s white wine at the back of the cabinet. A corkscrew in the drawer above the cabinet, amongst the cutlery. I press the screw in, and the cork plops into the wine.
Above my head comes a second pop, louder than before. I look up in time to see Michel’s foot rise and disappear into the hole he has made. A neat, foot-shaped piece of plaster lies intact under the window. It might have been stamped out by a die. The air is full of dust. Light enters between the room’s slatted blinds and cat-cradles the room.
Michel moves from rafter to rafter over my head.
The kitchen ceiling gives way. I go to see. The ribbed plastic shade covering the fluorescent ceiling light has fallen to the floor. The tube has shattered into fragments.
I take the second glass to the foot of the stepladder. ‘Michel.’
He’s still moving about up there, back and forth, back and forth – a cat trapped in a shed. ‘Yeah.’
‘I’ve got you a drink.’
‘What?’
‘A drink. I’ve got
you a drink. Come over to the ladder.’
He kneels down on the loft hatch and I lift the glass up to him. He says, ‘Why did you fuck my wife?’
‘What?’
‘You heard.’
‘She wasn’t your wife back then.’
‘Did you think I would never find out?’
‘You said it was all water under the bridge.’
‘I want to know why.’
‘We nearly got ourselves killed driving back from that fucking dreadful party you took us to. We took a moment.’
Michel comes down the ladder, very fast. I offer him his drink again. He slaps it out of my hand, but suddenly it all goes out of him. The anger. The frustration. ‘Fair enough,’ he says.
‘Your mum knew.’
‘Yes.’
‘She told you, that Christmas.’
Michel tries to laugh. ‘Not in so many words. She thought I ought to know. Because of your mum. Her depression. The way she vanished. All that.’
‘Well. Yes.’
I wish to God I’d said something before. It’s too late now.
The Margrave is still trading, in spite of the flood, the broken bridge, and all the petty emergencies snaggling the area. It’s a destination restaurant now, with a star. Green eels from the river in dill with a cucumber salad. Somewhere down the lane I dragged my mum’s body down, the water must be roiling by. I wonder what it looks like. I wonder if the flood is ploughing under all the changes that have been made since I was here last. I wonder if, unseen by me, it is returning the landscape to something I would recognise. I doubt it. Things do not ‘return to nature’. Nature fucks everything up and in the process fashions something new. The mind does not remember old geographies because, at its base, the mind is not nostalgic. It knows how the world is wired.
‘You think it’s coming, then. The Fall. In spite of this.’ I wave the menu – a symbol of human tenacity. It seems to me things are still pretty resilient. They’re serving puddings here, for crying out loud.