Republics of the Mind

by James Robertson

  They had to bring it home in a taxi because they had no car and it was too heavy to carry all the way. At the entrance to their close they did a short balancing act while Ken dug the keys out of his pocket and got the door open. As he backed in he happened to look up over Louise’s head. There was a flat across the street that fascinated him. Day or night, weekday or weekend, its curtains were always closed. He imagined all kinds of things going on behind those curtains: it was a brothel, a safe house, a bomb factory. A glance this time was all he needed to reassure himself that it was still shut tight against the world.

  Ken’s energy came in waves, ebbed like a tide. For the best part of a week the flatpack lay unopened behind the sofa in the front room. After the first day Louise did not mention it at all, until finally her silence shamed him into doing something about it. He had to admit, to himself, that it was far from convenient with most of their clothes still in suitcases, hung on the backs of doors, or laid out in layers on the sofa. There wasn’t space to swing a cat in the front room, or anywhere else in the flat for that matter. Not that they had a cat.

  Nearly a month had passed since they’d moved in. They’d lived together for a year, then decided to buy somewhere, because financially it made much more sense. The mortgage was less than the rent in the old place, but the flat was much smaller. They would sit in the kitchen in the evenings, after they’d eaten, trying to work out where to put things. He knew Louise wanted to tell him to get on with the wardrobe, that only then could they start getting the place in order, but she said nothing. Maybe, he thought, she was frightened that in banishing the chaos their lives would become petrified in some other way.

  As for Ken himself, well, he was already overwhelmed by lethargy. He wasted the evenings fixing other things instead, less important things like the towel rail in the bathroom or the washers on the kitchen taps. Some nights he made out he was just too tired and sat gazing at the crossword. Maybe he was testing her patience. But that wasn’t it really. What was bothering him wasn’t Louise, it wasn’t even the prospect of constructing the wardrobe. It was the shelf on the bedroom wall: he knew he was going to have to deal with the shelf first.

  It was useless, that shelf. It was stuck right in the middle of one wall of the bedroom, a strip of wood about four inches deep and eighteen inches long. It was only good for a few ornaments or maybe some paperbacks, although since it had no uprights at the ends even books would have to be laid flat to stay on. Because of its position it was impossible to put any large piece of furniture against that wall. And as the bedroom was tiny, and they needed all the space they could get, that was where the wardrobe had to go.

  He’d noticed the shelf when they first saw the flat, and, when their offer was accepted, it at once occurred to him, with a kind of sick feeling, that he’d have to remove it. He must have had a sixth sense about it, otherwise why the sick feeling? After all, it surely couldn’t be a big job, it was only a scrap of wood, painted, for some reason, post-box red. But something about it disturbed him, even before they’d settled an entry date.

  When he came to inspect it more closely, he realised that the shelf wasn’t held up by screws or brackets of any kind. It seemed to be embedded right into the wall. The previous owners had even papered round it as though it were a permanent fixture. It was a permanent fixture. He couldn’t understand why anyone would put such a stupid thing up. It was perverse, malicious. But then those people left a lot of other undesirable stuff behind them: toenails in the carpet; toothpaste stains all over the basin in the bathroom; a cupboard full of junk that he’d had to arrange for the council to take away to the cowp. All that was bad enough, but at least you could get rid of it. The shelf was a different proposition altogether.

  Finally one evening he surfaced from the lethargy and got started, digging around the edges of it, levering at the plaster, and every few minutes he would try to work the shelf loose. It refused to budge. He applied more force and it gave slightly, dislodging plaster with each sideways, upwards or downwards shift. It sounded like a pack of rats scurrying down the inside of the wall. Louise came in once with a cup of tea for him, and when he turned round he saw her mouth open in horror at the wound he was making in the wall. She was about to say something but then she didn’t.

  ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish,’ said Ken. That was a catch phrase from an old television programme, but he couldn’t think which one. He was sweating and his arms were sore from trying to prise the piece of wood out of the wall. She nodded, closed her mouth and went back to the kitchen.

  He wondered if he should have left well alone. But with the shelf still in place they could never put the wardrobe up. So he kept going, gouging and tearing away at it. That shelf was like an iceberg: the four inches sticking out of the wall was just what you could see.

  I’ve started so I’ll finish. He remembered now. Magnus Magnusson, the presenter on Mastermind.

  He made jokes to himself, in his head, because he needed to relieve the feeling that he’d made a terrible mistake. Supposing it wasn’t a shelf at all, but the projecting end of a beam, one of the principal timbers in the structure of the building? Pull away the shelf and he’d find himself dragging foot after foot of wood out from the wall. Then the wall would collapse, the ceiling fall in and all the flats tumble down in a huge roaring cloud of dust. Maybe the whole tenement and all the lives it contained were held up by this apparently insignificant useless bit of wood. He knew that was ridiculous, he was just getting hysterical. But the hole in the wall as he levered and dug around it was getting larger and larger, like a mouth stretched in an enormous yawn. In the middle the red shelf, coated now with a layer of pinkish dust, waggled insolently when he tugged at it.

  He looked at his watch and was amazed to see that an hour and a half had gone by. He couldn’t believe it. In frustration he picked up the hammer and lashed out at the underside of the shelf. Bits of stone and plaster clattered away down the building; any minute now the downstairs neighbour would be up to complain. But he could tell the blow had loosened something. He hit the shelf again. And again. After a minute he put the hammer down, grasped the shelf in both hands and pulled, and it came straight out, a good eight inches all told, with a huge lump of plaster firmly attached to its inner edge.

  He inspected the gaping hole and it made him panicky. He went to make up a batch of filler. Louise was still in the kitchen so he got water from the bathroom. He didn’t want her seeing the state of things. He had to brush out still more rubble and dust before he could slap in the filler. The hole seemed to suck it in and the filler made no impression upon it. He realised he’d have to use cement. Among the junk left by the previous occupants was a half-used bag of cement which by chance he’d not thrown out. He found an old bucket and mixed some cement up in it. Then he set to work to patch the hole.

  He had to build the wall back up in layers, allowing each layer to set a little before he pushed more cement into the cavity. He knew he wasn’t doing it properly, that it needed more time to dry, but he didn’t like the hole and he didn’t want Louise to see it so big. When he’d half-filled it he made himself stop to let the cement dry overnight.

  After all his efforts, when Louise came through to go to her bed she hardly noticed it, she was that tired. He sat up in the kitchen for a while, thinking things over.

  The next night he finished patching the wall. He filled the rest of the hole up and put a new strip of paper over where the shelf had been. He thought about getting some paint to match the colour in the room but then he thought – the wardrobe will hide it, what’s the point?

  Louise always left for work half an hour before he did, she had further to travel. He would hear her in the bathroom, and then in the front room where she went to dry her hair, put on her make-up and get dressed. He heard the hair-dryer every morning. When she left was when he got up. He would take a shower, have his breakfast, then walk the ten minutes to the shop. He was never late.

  The next morning was a T
hursday. Friday would be his day off because he was working at the weekend, but he wanted his day off right then. He lay awake for ten minutes after he heard the door close behind her. Then he turned over and went back to sleep.

  When he woke again it was ten o’clock. He got dressed and phoned the shop. He said he was sick and wouldn’t be in till Saturday. Then he went out for a paper.

  He made some coffee and read the paper, and thought about what he would do with the rest of the day. He went back into the bedroom to look at the wall. He’d overfilled the hole; there was a lump beneath the paper where the shelf had been. He’d made a lousy job of it, but once the wardrobe was in place no one would know.

  That was when he decided to build it. To cover the lump. Plus, it would be a surprise for Louise when she came home. He broke open the flatpack and read the instructions. He realised that if he built it in the front room, where there was a little space if he pushed everything back against the walls, he wouldn’t be able to move it into the bedroom. The doors of the two rooms were only a few inches apart, on the same side of the narrow passage. The wardrobe just wouldn’t go round. He was pleased with himself for spotting this before he started.

  The bed took up half the bedroom. He considered his options. Either he’d have to dismantle the bed and move it and the mattress and all the bedding out while he built the wardrobe, or he’d have to build it on its side, adapting the instructions, then turn it over onto its base into the space along the wall.

  The instructions were in Korean and bad English so it didn’t make a lot of difference where he started. He pulled out one of the sides and laid it on the carpet.

  Some time later, he was sweating and his arms ached but there was also a surge of satisfaction from having defied the manufacturers’ instructions. They’d said to build it one way and he’d built it another. It just showed you. All that was left was to hang the doors. These were surprisingly heavy for a piece of kit furniture. He decided to have a cup of tea before he fitted them.

  He was sitting on the bed sipping the tea, and as he allowed his spine to sag he felt a twinge. He had to sit back upright, which was difficult as the mattress on the bed was too soft. So he stood up, carefully, and went to the narrow window overlooking the street.

  The curtains of the flat opposite were closed as always. Below, in a gap between the buildings, was a little rockery and a bench set back on the pavement. Sometimes a man would sit there and smoke a cigarette; sometimes a woman with a pushchair; sometimes a couple would huddle together of an evening, watching the city darken against the sun. There was a couple there when he looked down, holding hands, not talking. It was about two in the afternoon.

  They were young, maybe eighteen or nineteen. There was something about them. They wore clothes that looked poor and out of fashion. The man’s hair was a straggled mess. The woman’s was covered by a headscarf. He thought this odd because he associated headscarves with much older women. The two of them reminded him of people you might see on the news, in the wake of an earthquake or walking out of a war zone. They hardly exchanged a word, but they seemed to be communicating some shared need to each other.

  As he watched from his window, he became aware with a kind of slow disbelief that they were preparing to have sex. The man was fiddling with the buttons of his trousers, while the woman was adjusting her clothing under her skirt. Suddenly the woman slipped across the man’s lap. There were a few seconds of clumsy jolts and shiftings and then the man stood up from the bench with the woman clinging to him, her legs wrapped around his waist. They were having sex in broad daylight in the middle of a quiet residential street. Were they not right in the head or something? Ken watched in amazement as the pumping movements of the couple gathered pace. They seemed to have melted together, like a tasteless ornament, and he thought he could hear through the glass a few grunts and moans. But it was over as suddenly as it had started, in just a few seconds. They separated like a pair of animals, without any kind of tenderness, and, re-covering themselves matter-of-factly, they stood up and walked away together down the street.

  He found that he had shrunk back from the glass, as if he was the one who should be concealing himself. He had the idea that if they’d looked up and seen him, they’d have shouted abuse at him: ‘Pervert!’ He imagined the echo of their shouts as they disappeared at the end of the street. He had to ask himself if it was true, if he had really seen what he had seen. But he knew it was true. And suddenly all the energy he had gathered while building the wardrobe rushed out of him.

  When Louise came home he was in the kitchen, making the tea. She stood in the doorway unbuttoning her coat. ‘Hi,’ she said.

  ‘Hi, there,’ he said over his shoulder.

  ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘you’re off tomorrow, aren’t you? Well, I took a holiday too. I thought we could put that wardrobe together, and then maybe I would go and look for new curtains.’ (The previous people had left some thin, dirty curtains along with the rest of their rubbish.)

  She seemed very decisive. He turned smiling from the sink where he was washing vegetables and said, ‘Go and look in the bedroom.’

  ‘Why?’ she asked.

  ‘Go on,’ he said. ‘Just go and look.’

  He heard her little squeal of pleasure through there. When she came back she walked over and kissed him on the cheek. She tried to put her arms around him but he shrugged her off. ‘My hands are wet,’ he said.

  ‘When did you do it?’ she asked.

  ‘I came home early,’ he told her. ‘I said I had a headache. I just wanted to get it done.’

  ‘That’s brilliant,’ she said. ‘Now we can get everything put away.’

  ‘What about your day off?’ he said. ‘You’ll not need it now.’

  ‘Well, then,’ said Louise, ‘we can get a long lie. We can still go looking for curtains.’

  Later they stood together at the front window of the tiny flat. Louise had spent the previous hour loading the wardrobe with her clothes. She seemed animated, happy, for the first time since they’d moved in.

  ‘There’s just one thing,’ she said. ‘One of the doors isn’t hanging right. You have to kind of give it a wee lift to get it to close properly.’

  He knew all about that. A wave of frustration went over him. He’d spent ages adjusting the hinges. He’d done his best but when you got the top hinge right the bottom one went out of line. And she’d had to point it out.

  ‘It’s these kits,’ he said. ‘They’re badly finished. I’ll have to get new hinges.’

  In the flats in the building opposite, the corner rooms had windows to the front and side. Louise envied them, because, she said, they must get so much light. But in the flat on the same level as theirs the curtains were closed, although it was only eight o’clock, and still not dark.

  ‘Have you ever noticed about that flat?’ she said.

  ‘What?’ he said, but he knew what she was going to say.

  ‘The curtains are always closed,’ she said.

  ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘I kept meaning to mention it.’ But that wasn’t true. He hadn’t said anything to her about the couple in the street either. ‘It doesn’t matter what time of the day or night it is, they’re always closed tight. It’s weird, isn’t it?’

  ‘Always,’ she said. ‘When I’m drying my hair in here in the morning, before you get up, it’s become a kind of habit of mine to check, and I’ve never yet seen them open. I thought maybe whoever stays there works nightshifts, but they’re closed all the time.’

  ‘Even on my days off I’ve never seen them open,’ he said. ‘And at weekends too. No sign of life at all.’

  They stood watching together. And just as he finished speaking, something happened across the street. For a moment, the briefest of moments, a hand appeared, clutching a fold of one of the curtains and pulling it back slightly. All that could be seen was that hand, fisted against the shoddy brown of the curtain. Then it was gone.

  ‘Did you see that?’ he said. ‘
Jesus! Did you see that?’

  ‘Oh God,’ she said, ‘that is weird. Just when we were talking about it. That is weird.’

  ‘Did you see it?’ he shouted. His heart was pumping. ‘Oh God! A hand!’

  She laughed, the kind of laugh you give to reassure yourself and whoever you’re with. He joined in, and he made a ghostly quavering sound through his lips.

  ‘Oo-oo-oo-ooh!’

  ‘The ha-a-a-nd!’ she said tremulously.

  They clutched at each other with witches’ fingers, laughing and shrieking. ‘We’re doomed!’ he said. Now he was doing his Private Frazer impersonation from Dad’s Army. ‘We’re doomed, Captain Mainwaring!’

  She laughed and laughed. And just for a moment it was all clear. An unseen stranger across the street had sparked it off, but he believed if he could keep her laughing things might work out. But he saw also that anything was possible, that they might laugh or cry, they might feel safe or frightened, it just depended. It was up to them but then again it wasn’t. It just depended.

  After a while the laughter died down and Louise was catching her breath. Ken’s heart was still going though. He turned away from the window, back to the tiny, cramped rooms of their new home, and began to manoeuvre between the bits of furniture, away from Louise and the strange things that were going on outside.

  The Dictionary

  I went to look up a word in the dictionary this morning, as one does. Some people think that writers shouldn’t have to, that we should know all the meanings of words, and certainly how they are spelt, already. This is like expecting a motor mechanic to work without tools, or a surgeon without instruments. Arthur Scargill once said his father read the dictionary every day. ‘Your life,’ Mr Scargill senior observed, ‘depends on your power to master words.’ This is especially true for writers, who make a living from the words they use.