In fact, there has only been a single mishap in more than two decades of service: the massive one which continues to puzzle me. I watch my wife, peek at her when she’s busy, or reading a magazine, or asleep, and I think: This is the sort of woman who would marry a janitor.
She has married a janitor. But I am the sort of man who has never felt like a janitor. I am the wrong man for the job. I have simply continued to be a janitor by default while I have waited to discover what I’m really supposed to do. I am an acting janitor—yes, one of many years’ standing, but, all the same—this surely must make me an acting husband, too.
She bought us matching anoraks in the last January sales. They are perfectly pleasant and warm and were once expensive, but they are still matching and still anoraks—blue with blocks of purple at the shoulders and unnecessary woven tabs attached to the zips: a 44 chest for me and a 40 for her. She used to be smaller, smaller everywhere. And out we go, of a Saturday, to shop—the janitor and his better half in their matching anoraks. That can’t be right.
I mean, I don’t exactly mind my having to play out the janitor’s part. Around the house, I tend my paintwork and window boxes the way a country stationmaster might. I guessed this was the right thing to do and it has, indeed, impressed three successive heads. My bulbs and geraniums flourish and I rarely have to dig out cigarette stubs from amongst them because, out in the school’s world, I keep my population terrified. Among four- to twelve-year-olds—that’s the limit to what we take—I am an undisputed king. In the boys’ toilets, the only graffiti I won’t have removed is a narrow line in smudgy biro that warns of the dangers of me. I didn’t put it there myself.
So I don’t hate the role, not entirely, it’s only that acting the janitor has come to be almost all there is of me. I do object to that: my unwelcome self, the finish to my shift when I swing quickly home—it’s not exactly far away—and I prise off the Doc Martens and, soft- and hot-footed, I pad straight into the type of domestic bliss designed to please a janitor, the janitor I am not. Sticky boy, dark house, a wife whose sweat, when fresh, smells large but herbal, something like the after-aroma left by crushed leaves of mint, which is weird, though also cheering and familiar—only not for me. Cheering and familiar, that isn’t love.
I used to fuck her while I wore the uniform. That worked for a number of years—once a month, or so. It meant that I could combine the more comfortable side of my duties with the areas that were escalating, developing alarming filaments and structures, like a dry rot spreading up inside my future. She liked it, I think: the costume sex. My buttons were the great thing—the tiny nips of chill from them as she pulled my jacket hard against her skin and the way they’d wink in the gloom of the kitchen, or the gloom of wherever else in the house she’d caught me. Doing it this way suggested types of strange authority. We both enjoyed that.
We differed about my trousers, though. I preferred them at half-mast, this nourishing the longest-running sexual fantasy I’ve ever had: the one where I’m unmasked suddenly by an admiring, anonymous throng while the pale force of my arse keeps slamming manfully into the space provided between a pair of cocked and shaking legs. I do look at my best from the back—not a bit like an invalid.
My wife wanted me to march up and perform the necessary introduction with just my flies undone, giving her the full experience of the dark blue serge, so to speak. But this felt as if I was trying to screw her from inside a pillar box and, almost immediately, my zip would cramp in and saw at the base of my cock—sometimes in stereo—and then, when I’d managed everything anyway, I would tend to be left with stains to sponge off before I could go back out and face the children.
After several discussions, my wife and I, we did the married thing and compromised, took it approximately in turns to be more or less dissatisfied. And Mal’s arrival put an end to our dilemma, in any case. Although I tried to keep my hat on in bed for a time, even after that. I wanted to show willing.
But while I was still performing as the fancy-dress violator, there were some afternoons and evenings, as I marched out patrolling the school, when I would realise that I still smelt of fucking. Nothing obscene, or offensive—more a slight heat in the air when I leaned forward, a vaguely electrical taste under the breath.
This, I am absolutely sure, is what made the cleaners take to me. The two younger guys I was technically in charge of would find themselves teased and harassed, almost daily, but our ladies were purely solicitous with me, as if the slight atmosphere of aftermath I sometimes brought along made them think that I must be tired, or worth spoiling. I was made cups of tea, given baking, loaned a read at their papers and magazines. In return, I’d let a few of them sit in my bothy, have a comfortable cigarette in their break.
Jean wasn’t one of the smokers, but she’d wander by, too. Lovely woman, Jean, a truly decent person. When everyone first heard the terms of the private tender: the terrible money, the stupid hours: she cried solidly, right through, until it was time for them to head off home. I had to let her have my armchair and close the door. Terrible.
Now she cleans about as badly as everyone else, but there are evenings when she’ll forget herself and suddenly a corridor floor will be perfect—not with a thin, shiny pathway rubbed out between the muck—clean from wall to wall, the old way. Or the taps will end up sparkling, sinks glossed, or a classroom will seem warm and tended, as if somebody cared. I gave her a box of chocolates the Christmas after our change of contracts and she blushed. So now I do it every year. This isn’t so much because of the blushes, but because she may well be as out of place in her life as I am in mine. Displaced persons should know one another and be kind. If you can’t have love, you can sometimes have kindness.
Once I almost told her what happened—why I’m this man and not myself. But people often think the story’s funny when I don’t want them to, so instead I went back and told everything to Malcolm. It’s not what I’d intended, but we were stuck in one of our silences and this filled a gap.
I was hit by a cyclist. Not one on a motorbike—a cyclist: the tinny bell and pump and pedal type of cyclist. Which is ridiculous, I can see. I’ve been alive, as I’ve said, for forty-three years and I’ve never met anyone else who was hit by a bicycle in broad daylight: they’re not tricky to spot, it isn’t enormously difficult to step out of their way, they are—as far as everyone else is concerned—quite harmless. Me, I was caught full on by one and hospitalised. I was given a crack in my skull, a dislocated shoulder and a few other odds and ends which were less important, but the whole thing took up my time when I should have been studying for my first set of proper exams.
In the end I took re-sits. I didn’t do well and then I couldn’t settle and then, without further reason, I no longer wanted to try. My mother—who cleaned in a hospital, not a school—she’d intended me for great things and my father and I—not wage-earners—had believed her. We had enjoyed believing. But, after the bicycle hurt me, I couldn’t find my pleasant expectations any more. I waited, sullen, at the back of my various classes and passed the time until each reached its end by making an echo come inside my head. Whatever jolt I’d taken to the brain had left me with the knack of modifying everything I heard—I could still do it up until my twenties. If I concentrated, sounds would waver, pause and then tip into a tumbled repetition, as if they were bouncing off my own private cliff and, every time this started up, my solitary—also echoing—thought would be: My talent, my only one, it had to be this—the magical ability to turn any noise into something you might hear from inside a Hammond organ. I may not have called it a Hammond organ by name, but that’s what I meant.
So I left school with just enough qualifications to be a janitor: first a junior and then a senior janitor. When I told this to Malcolm, I finished with Wasn’t that handy?—I get to wear a hat not adding in which I used to screw your ma, when I could still manage—your mother, the first girl I met who said that she’d marry me—I was quite sure there would not be another so I
didn’t look.
And, by the way, my accident is the reason why I am not a physicist, or a diver, or a great, theatrical illusionist: why I am this way and you are like that. And why did the cycle hit me in the first place? Because I was mooning about at the foot of a hill, imagining—can you believe it—the hundreds of things I might do once I was a graduate from a university. An honours degree at Oxford, St. Andrews, or Aberdeen, I had it planned out in detail. Then down came the irony and the bike.
Malcolm asked me if the cyclist was all right. He has a generous nature, Mal. I told him the man wore a helmet, so he was fine. That’s why we wear our helmets—they keep us safe. Perhaps I should wear mine in bed.
Not that I cycle as much now as I used to, because of my diseases.
After the story, it was time that Mal turned in. Once he’d got settled, I strolled up and wished him good-night, then sat at the top of the stairs as the evening gradually tilted away towards bedtime for me and my wife. Which is not so good. My marital inabilities have become a source of tension. She has told me to see the doctor, sometimes she shouts, or I do, but for the most part we take care to separate our arrivals beneath the covers with a decent interval and then to plunge rapidly into feigned or genuine sleep.
I pressed my spine against the edge of the highest step and focused on the stairwell, pictured it as the black of a deep pool. It’s soothing to think of water, gathered up in a soft column that could be private and hold me, the impression of warm rocks around it and sun and living, undutiful air.
When I first saw Elizabeth, I was doing much the same. My arms were hanging over the banisters, an easy weight, and I was staring, without minding, down from the third floor to the ground and the infants’ classrooms. Then she was there.
And it shouldn’t be possible to have that much attention simply scooped up out of you by the curve of someone’s shoulders, the top of her head, the tone of her footfalls, the March sun through a dirty, south-facing window just slowing across the shape and the sheen of her hair. By the time she’d climbed enough to show me her face, I’d been inhaling for more than a minute. She smiled at me the way pleasant people will if they pass an inoffensive stranger. Packed with breath, I tried to lever my body away from the handrail, but I was locked there, lungs stinging. She walked softly behind me and went on through the fire door and into the top passageway. I couldn’t even turn my head.
The light in the stairwell streamed with sheets and flourishes of dust.
I breathed out.
Elizabeth Harrison, permanent replacement teacher for Primary 5b, the most fortunate class in creation. Her predecessor, the manic Mrs. Winters, had slithered from two sick days in the week up to three and then had disappeared entirely. This makes her directly responsible for allowing me to be dumbfounded one spring morning by Elizabeth Harrison who is, in her turn, completely to blame for keeping me that way.
For the rest of the day I couldn’t stop it, the dumbfoundedness, the silly, hot pounces of intention—
If I look in her room once she’s gone then I’ll find …
Well, what would I find?
In the end, something. The room, anyway, will smell of her—her room, it stands to reason, it stands perfectly. I could bring her letters from the office in the mornings, check the windows, see how she feels she’s fitting in. Tell her she should drink bottled water, the stuff here is terrible: bad pipes, I’ve reported and reported it.
No. I will not look in her room. Her room is in a building twelve yards away from the home of my wife and son. Which is my home also.
But I don’t want it.
But I won’t look in her room.
I will show her magic. I will be a magician for her, I will give her that instead.
Prestidigitation: it’s another interest I don’t share with my family. Useful in school, though. Our present Head doesn’t approve, but in the past I have put on shows for the older classes: entertaining and good for the myth of my professional omnipotence. I taught myself; most of the things I know, I’ve learned about with no help but my own.
Now, in rainy lunch hours, I sometimes let a few kids into the bothy—a second janitor there to chaperon, of course, you can’t be too cautious—and I give them tiny, necessary lessons in impossibility. A card can’t be in my right hand and, at the same time, in my left: it can’t move from somewhere to nowhere and back again: it can’t be its own self and also something else. But, then again, it can, if you understand the trick of it.
At the very least, none of my pupils will be taken in by a shell game, or anything like it, and they won’t bet on finding the lady: she can’t be found. Some of the brighter ones may remember that nice confusion when I’ve pulled out fifty-pences from inside their ears, or failed to cut off their thumbs with my guillotine. When they realise, much later, that their needs deny physical laws, or that all adults are helplessly, regularly tricked and must frequently be themselves and also total strangers, then I hope they may feel they have been, in some minor way, prepared.
For Elizabeth, I laid on a private show. My hands stumbled and bumped when I opened the door for her, pointed out the best of my chairs, but they settled once I’d started the routine. I drew solid rings in and out of bottles they couldn’t fit, poured pints into quarts and vice versa, took her wristwatch—with her temperature—wrapped it in a handkerchief, destroyed it with a hammer and then gave it back unharmed. She was nervous about the guillotine, so I only used it on myself. The one thing she asked to see again was the old, flip-flop roll of a coin across my knuckles, left to right and right to left, ad infinitum.
“This isn’t a trick, though.”
“No. I can see that.”
“It’s a training thing—to keep your fingers supple.” This, because of the mood I was in, sounded personal and inappropriate. I kept on talking, so that I wouldn’t blush. “The old magicians, they trained to incredible levels. Houdini taught himself to pick up pins using just his eyelashes.”
She frowned very gently, shivered the substance of everything, “Why?”
“Because he thought he should be able to.”
That, I intended to sound personal and inappropriate.
The following morning, I started to grow a moustache. I wanted to be different for her. Mal said he liked it and my wife said she did not, as if it could interfere with kisses we no longer exchanged. And, Friday afternoon, six weeks after Elizabeth Harrison had arrived, the playground all raw with the scent of spring, no kids, door closed, I leaned along her desk in her classroom and kissed her, Elizabeth.
And this is it now, isn’t it? Love.
The moustache didn’t interfere.
She’d been telling me about her father. We did this a lot: exchanging information, as if we were forms we’d each have to complete, would enjoy completing. There was no rush, her husband didn’t collect her on a Friday, so I’d talked about these two guinea pigs I’d had when I was seven, or eight, and then we moved on to cats, her cat, the way they interrupt you on the telephone, like children—she has no children—and then her father and the way he shouts whenever he rings, as if he had to compensate for the distance set between them, and then she paused and couldn’t meet my eyes and then I kissed her. On her mouth.
After that I looked to see if she needed more white chalk and I mentioned something about littering in the playground and every sound outside was somebody coming to fetch me, to make me stop, but no one arrived and I licked my lips—she tastes of me, like me—and she walked, came to stand at my side, and watch the evening start up through the windows.
“Why did they put down gravel, do you think?”
“Because they don’t like children.” My voice seeming very small, or my self grown larger and hot. “Schools never really do.”
“That’s a terrible thing to say.”
And the room rolled to make me face her, hold her for balance, and again kiss. Elizabeth’s hands caught behind me, low, at the small of my back, precisely where a heavy, silvery fe
eling had started to flower and seep, as soon as we closed ourselves in that first touch.
“I’m glad I have this classroom.” Her voice on my neck, sleek under my shirt, inside my ribs: the key to open me. “It gets so much sun.”
Trying not to twitch against her, flinch, wanting to be only smooth, secure. “You might not be so glad in the summer.”
“I can keep the windows open.”
“Yes. You can do that.”
When we swayed apart, she brushed the hair above my ear, which made me feel sick: in a good way, sick. I couldn’t think of anything to do back. “Well, I’ll see you on Monday, then.” Which I hadn’t meant to sound as if I’d be leaving, but then again, I didn’t know how to stay. My pulse had thickened, it was making everything jump, I was sure it would be visible.
And is that what she’d like to see? I mean, are we both being careful, or is it that we’re not meant to care when we happen to each other and taste like each other—are we not supposed to say? We do this as if we’re not doing this? Does she know that I’m hard now? Does she want that or not? Me or not?
I walked to the door and was, the whole time, dropping into the dark of a pool, something that muffled my breath.
Here I am, though, myself. This is me now, found. This is love.
Schools are watchful places, full of little eyes, but Elizabeth and I, we were invisible, truly. I adored it: to pass across the playground and glance up, find the shape of her, looking down, class out of sight. We would never acknowledge each other, but we would know. Just as we did in the crowd at assembly when I might pass her without a sign, then lean by the doorway, unsteadied as the thought of her rose in me, detonated: so much beauty.
So much beauty. And we do know, don’t we? We do both know.
In the end, I told Mal. I didn’t want to, but I needed to make my love exist out loud.
At this time, he was five, I think, or just six, and before he slept we’d talk, or I’d read to him, make up stories. In a desert, in a castle, in a dungeon, there was a prison guard and everyone thought he was nobody special and he agreed. The guard, he was our favourite—close enough to me to be familiar, far enough away for us to like him. He was called Ted and he fought with the usual monsters, some of them from outer space, but then headed for home to be in love with his lady. She looked, in each story, not unlike Malcolm’s mother, because I’m not a fool. But his love for her was new every time he met her, it made him better than himself, it was like being hungry and on holiday and wanting Christmas and feeling that it’s close.
Indelible Acts Page 15