One day I put the marble in my pocket and drove over to Clifton, looking for the café where Nicola had told me we were two of a kind. Of course, it had long since gone. Clifton was way too upmarket by then for sleepy little hippie businesses, and the café had been replaced by a shop selling hand-made fabrics. I’d planned to sit at our favourite table, but now I decided instead to recreate the walk to that place in the woods where Nicola and I had shared our first and last kisses. She wouldn’t be with me, of course, but I persuaded myself that if I moved through that same space again, holding her present in my hand, it would bring her at least a little bit nearer.
Halfway across the bridge, though, I stopped. I don’t know what had changed inside me, but I was suddenly appalled, almost to the point of nausea, by the idea of going over the same wretched ground, prodding that same old wound, and attempting yet one more time to construct the semblance of a living being out of absence and empty air. Clutching the marble tightly in my hand, I looked down into the drop. A wire mesh had been installed since my student days to prevent people throwing themselves off, as so many had done in the past, but there were small square holes cut in it, so as still to allow an uninterrupted view.
What did I remember of Nicola, I challenged myself? What did I really remember? I could call to mind, at least approximately, the colour of her hair and her eyes (brown in both cases, though her hair had likely faded by now, as my own had done). I could remember roughly how tall she was, and the fact that she was fairly slim. But now I tried, I couldn’t call to mind even the vaguest image of her face, or hear in my head the sound of her voice. Yes, and apart from a few iconic words – ‘You and me are two of a kind’ – which had very possibly themselves been worn into new shapes by constant rehearsal, like buffeted pebbles in a stream, I couldn’t clearly remember anything she’d said. All I could really be certain of was the fact that, at the time, I’d found her words engaging, and that she’d found my words engaging too. But that was a long time ago. I fancied myself to be a communist back then. I found Monty Python funny. I thought On the Road was the greatest work of literature I’d ever read. And Nicola, though I still thought of her as excitingly older than me, had been twenty years younger than I was now.
Wasn’t it really the case that what I most loved Nicola for was simply her interest in me? Hadn’t I loved her so very much because she was the first grown-up woman who’d treated me like a grown-up man, when I’d feared that might never happen at all? I remembered Nicola’s friend Fay, that other mature student on the course. She’d been really strikingly beautiful, like a model or a film star, and I’d actually noticed her before I noticed Nicola, though she’d seemed so far out of my own league as not even to be worth fantasising about. But suppose Fay had sought me out to help her with her project, and suppose she’d been the one who’d leant towards me over a café table and told me that she and I were two of a kind. Was there really any doubt that I would have fallen for her just as I fell for Nicola?
After all, I didn’t know who I was back then. Dear God, I didn’t even experience myself as having a face! Wasn’t it the truth that I’d have been happy to be told I was just like them by any halfway attractive human being, perhaps even men as well as women? And wouldn’t I have been happy to believe it too?
I opened my hand and looked down at the marble. I’d been clutching it so tightly that it had made a small bruised dent in the flesh of my palm. Tears came to my eyes. I had invested so much in this little ball of glass. I had laboured so long and so hard to keep the cold flame burning.
But I reached out over the railing and let it fall.
Still Life
A small greenhouse stood on the paved backyard of a long unoccupied house. It had a concrete floor and a single aluminium shelf. On the shelf stood three empty plastic flowerpots, with a fourth lying on its side. A watering can, moulded from red plastic, rested on the floor by the door.
It was the middle of a summer afternoon. Up until midday, the sky had been clear. All morning, the radiation had been pouring down from the sun, with no cloud in the way to reflect it back. Outside the greenhouse, the sun had warmed the soil and the roof of the house, and heated the black tarmac of the road it stood on to the point that it had become soft and sticky. In their turn, the soil, the road and the roof had warmed the air above them. As the air warmed, it had risen upwards, cooler air flowing in beneath it to take its place.
Inside the greenhouse the sun had also heated everything that was there: the aluminium, the concrete, the plastic pots and the red watering can. They too had warmed the air above them, but, unlike the air outside, the air in the greenhouse was trapped by the glass roof, which meant that, even when it was hot, it still remained close to the warm concrete and the aluminium and the plastic. And so the concrete and the metal and the plastic had continued to heat the same already-heated air, as if they were a hotplate on a stove, and the greenhouse was a saucepan with its lid on. The air became very hot in there, and far hotter than the air outside.
Later on, as morning turned to afternoon, the sky clouded over and a cold wind began to blow. The air outside the greenhouse, already so much cooler than the air within, became colder still. But the air in the greenhouse, still sitting over that warm concrete and aluminium, stayed warm. It would cool down eventually, of course, but it would do so much more slowly than the air outside. Only the glass cooled quickly, because of the cold air rushing over it.
It so happened that the humidity was high that day. Inside the greenhouse, the warm air came up against the much colder glass, and some of the water vapour that it was carrying began to condense on the cool surface. Quite soon, the whole inner surface of the glass was steamed up, covered in a layer of tiny water droplets.
Some of these water droplets were heavier than the others, to the point where the constant tugging of the planet Earth beneath them became stronger than the surface tension that held them against the glass. The droplets on the glass windows began to slip downwards and, as they slipped, they collided with other droplets, absorbing the water into themselves and so becoming heavier still. The larger they grew, the smaller was their surface area in relation to their mass. As a result, the pull of the planet became stronger, relatively speaking, and the surface tension weaker. So the drops moved more quickly, and absorbed water more quickly too from yet more droplets. And all the greenhouse’s windows were striped with the paths that these heavy drops had made.
The same thing happened under the glass roof, but here, when they had accumulated enough mass, the droplets didn’t just slide down the inside of the glass but also began to drip. The drips fell straight downwards through the still-warm air inside the greenhouse, to splash onto the concrete floor, or the aluminium shelf, or sometimes onto the plastic pots or the can.
Having shed some of its weight in this way, a droplet would stop dripping, its surface tension once again strong enough to hold it together, and it would resume its descent down the inside slope of the roof, until it had accumulated enough water from smaller drops to rupture once more and release drips.
This sequence of events had happened many times. One of its consequences was that, while the glass of the roof, like that of the windows, was striped with the trails of water droplets, these roof trails were punctuated at more or less regular intervals with bulges, like beads on a necklace, where the water had paused and dripped.
And so, although the glass inside the greenhouse had been dry in the middle of the morning, now there were stripes of water on the walls, beads of water on the ceiling, and drips of water falling at regular intervals from the ceiling to the floor.
People were not involved in this story. There were no human beings present at all. There was life in the vicinity, it was true: weeds grew just outside the greenhouse – nettles, speedwell, grass, dandelions – and among this vegetation there lived earwigs, spiders, slugs, woodlice and snails. But none of them had anything at all to do with the stripes, or the beads, or the steady drips.
Beyond the glass of the greenhouse roof, and far above it, new dark clouds were moving rapidly through the atmosphere.
They were also made of drops of water, and these water droplets were clumping together up there in the clouds, like the droplets had done inside the greenhouse.
And presently fat drops began to fall from them, spinning and turning through all that empty air, until they splashed on the greenhouse roof, ran down its glass, and trickled off it again in tiny waterfalls, onto the weeds and the soil.
Dear
A man called James lives in one of the two groundfloor bedsits. He’s the same sort of age as me, in his early thirties. He is tolerably good looking, always wears a jacket and tie and is, as my aunt Angelica puts it, ‘very well spoken’, all of which would also be a fair description of myself. I first met him when Angelica became convinced that some intruder was ‘prowling round’ inside the building. At her request, I called on every resident to ask if they’d seen strangers on the stairs.
When James met me at his door, I could see him noticing my surprise that a man like him should be living in a place like this. The two of us really were quite alike, and he acknowledged this with an odd little smile: sly, complicit, and strangely self-satisfied.
‘By the way,’ he told me, when we’d finished discussing Angelica’s imaginary prowlers, ‘I should warn you that I may not remember you if I see you again. Did a stupid thing, you see, a few years back. Got a bit depressed and tried to kill myself with the exhaust of my car. I wouldn’t recommend it. Memory’s all shot to pieces. Can’t hold onto anything for more than ten minutes or so.’
It seemed odd to me that he should reveal something so personal when we’d only just met, but the strangest part was the way he smiled as he told me about his calamity. It was the same smile he’d greeted me with, the smile of a schoolboy with a sick note that will get him off for the rest of term.
On the opposite side of the hall to James lives a Brummie woman called Sheila, who James refers to as ‘the bag lady’. I gather she’s in her fifties, though it would be hard to tell, because she has no front teeth, a ravished, bloodshot face, and is sort of shapeless, as if all the various parts of her body have been broken up so many times that, in the end, any attempt to properly reassemble them has been abandoned, and they’ve just been tossed anyhow into a roughly body-shaped sack. According to James, who seems to know a surprising amount for a man with a ten-minute memory, she really did used to live on the streets until Dr Hodgson took her in. ‘She still drinks a bottle of sherry a day,’ he told me, smiling as he watched my eyes for a reaction.
Sheila dotes on James, cleans his room and brings him cups of tea. I’ve had to call in on him a number of times since that first occasion, all in connection with various worries of my aunt’s, and I’ve several times witnessed him receiving these offerings of Sheila’s in a way that reminds me of some colonial district officer accepting a gift from a benighted native: amused, puzzled, slightly contemptuous, but nevertheless pleased. ‘I know it’s absurd, but what can I do about it?’ his half-apologetic expression seems to say as he glances towards me and sees me watching. But it is only half-apologetic. There’s always that trace of self-satisfaction and complicity. He and I are too well brought up to mention it, that look seems to say, but we both know I secretly envy him for living in a bedsit with a worn lino floor, and having a bag lady to care for him.
Once, on some errand of my aunt’s, I intruded on the two of them watching a TV game show. James was in his armchair, Sheila kneeling at his feet with her hand inside his fly.
‘Oops,’ he said, pushing her away.
‘Bad moment.’ But even then, he smiled.
On the next floor lives a man named Doug. He’s now in his fifties, like Sheila, but I gather he spent most of his early life in some kind of institution, a hospital for the mentally retarded or some such thing, from which he was discharged in his twenties into what is called The Community. Even after thirty years, he still misses that place. He’s told me many times that he used to work in the laundry there, and the highlight of his day was riding round on the back of an electric vehicle from ward to ward, picking up sacks of dirty clothes, and dropping off clean ones. Everyone knew him, he says. Staff and patients, high grades and low grades: everyone in the whole hospital knew Doug the laundryman.
Perhaps surprisingly, in view of his laundry experience, Doug doesn’t go in for washing things. Every time I see him, he’s wearing the same black suit which has become shiny with the particles of grease that now fill in each gap between one fibre and the next. The flat stinks of cigarette smoke, old chip fat, urine and sour stale sweat.
Doug’s not much good with money either. From what he tells me, he pawns his wristwatch for a few quid at the end of most weeks and then buys it back again for twice as much when his benefits come through. Sometimes, when I call on him, he asks me for a loan: ‘just a couple of quid, mate, to tide me over till Friday’. I never get the money back, but that doesn’t stop him, a week or two later, making the same request without so much as a mention of the existing debt.
Next to Doug is a bedsit which Dr Hodgson – the Doctor, as his tenants call him – keeps for his own use on his visits to Bristol. He was born in the city and used to live and work here, but these days he’s a reader in mathematics at the University of Edinburgh. At first glance, he’s quite imposing to look at – well over six feet tall, strong, broad-shouldered and boyishly handsome for a man in his early sixties – but at second glance you see that the man himself barely inhabits this body. It’s like a suit of clothes that’s several sizes too big for him, and way too flashy. Someone much smaller and more diffident peeps out of its eyes, someone more like his own tenants, and more like me.
He’s a considerate landlord. He doesn’t keep the house in brilliant repair, but this is down to his unworldliness, rather than meanness or indifference to the well-being of the residents. He always gets problems fixed as soon as they’re raised with him without a quibble, and his rents are extremely low.
My aunt Angelica has the whole top floor to herself, so that her place isn’t a bedsit like the others but a proper flat, with a bedroom, living room, small kitchen and even a tiny spare room. She became quite friendly with the Doctor for a while, about a decade ago, at a time when he was based in Oxford for a year and came over to Bristol pretty much every weekend. The two of them had tea together a few times, apparently, and on one occasion – one fateful occasion – she even cooked him a meal.
Now Angelica stares at me with her enormous eyes. Her cup of tea has come to a standstill halfway to her mouth.
‘He’s visiting again?’
‘That’s right, Aunty. He phoned me to let me know.’
I replace my own slightly grubby teacup on its chipped saucer.
‘This is his house, after all,’ I point out. ‘He is entitled to come.’
I live about two miles away and visit every couple of days. It’s a duty I perform at the request of my mother, Angelica’s younger sister. (‘I’m so sorry to put this onto you, David, but I really need you to do it for me. Angelica needs a lot of support, but for all kinds of reasons to do with our childhood relationship – don’t worry, darling, I won’t bore you with it now! – I’m just not up to taking it on.’)
‘He might be entitled to come here in a legal sense,’ Aunt Angelica says. ‘But that’s entirely beside the point. Why does he need to come, that’s what I want to know?’
As in the rest of the building, there’s a faint whiff of decay in Angelica’s flat. She adds considerably to the general dinginess by keeping the curtains drawn and the windows firmly closed, but it’s all very genteel. There’s a three-piece suite in a slightly threadbare floral print, a dresser with a dinner set on display, and
a china shepherdess on the mantelpiece above the small gas fire.
‘He must know how much it upsets me,’ she says. ‘And it unsettles the others too, particularly that poor old Doug who of course he should never have taken on in the first place.’
Angelica sees herself, among other things, as Doug’s protector. He comes up to her flat quite often, and she meets him at her door to dispense handfuls of coins as grandly as if she was the lady of the manor and he was some kind of grateful peasant. But as far as I’ve been able to gather, neither Doug nor the other two tenants are troubled in any way by their landlord’s visits. Quite the contrary, in fact: James enjoys the contact with another educated man, Sheila thinks he’s ‘lovely’ and ‘a perfect gent’, and, perhaps because of his institutional background, Doug is quite obsessed with him, to the point where much of his conversation seems to revolve around what the Doctor said last time, what he said in reply, and what he’s going to say to the Doctor when he visits next. None of this, however, is of any interest to Angelica.
‘There’s no real reason for him to come,’ she insists. ‘It’s not as if he works in this town any more.’
Like her eyes, her mouth is very large in comparison to her tiny face and frame and is tremendously expressive in an almost cartoon-like way.
‘And in any case,’ she adds quickly, before I can point out that in fact he does still have academic commitments down here, even if he is based in Scotland, ‘there are such things as hotels, and the man is absolutely made of money. I really don’t see why I should endure this, year after year after year!’
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