Communion Town

by Sam Thompson

  He was trying angrily to get the locker open so that he could go when a woman came in, fumbling with a flower-patterned umbrella, shedding droplets and pushing hair out of her face. Her pastel raincoat was so outmoded that she looked at first glance like an elderly lady, but he saw that she was around his own age. He watched with interest as she tried to hold her umbrella under one arm and search in her bag, while at the same time unsticking the soaked hem of her cotton dress from her legs. Then, as she crossed the entrance hall, the string of her necklace somehow snapped and tiny beads poured across the flagstones – it was the same sound he had heard that morning when rain began to fall into the park. She grabbed at the middle of her chest and gasped as though she had been drenched.

  There was an opportunity here, of course, if he were to step forward and help her collect the beads, joking, making light of the accident; but he found he preferred the scene as it was. He stayed quite still as she knelt down, her hair dropping into her face and the umbrella falling away from her with a clatter.

  After following her up the stairs at a safe distance he loitered among the shelves of the art history section, watching her take a book down and leaf through the stiff pages. At the end of the aisle a notice listed the contents of the room. He picked out a name he thought sounded familiar and browsed along the shelf until he was beside her.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘This artist, Albert Gaunt? Do you know, where would I …?’

  Only a little alarmed, she showed him where to find the books. He thanked her in a warm undertone and touched her elbow for an instant. She looked up and down the aisle, then told him that Gaunt was one of her favourites. He said, his too. Someone further along the shelves exhaled disapprovingly. Simon caught her eye and made a mischievous face.

  At that first meeting it had taken him a few minutes to grow restless in her company. He had watched her trying to conceal how nervous he made her. It had been obvious that he would always be able to predict what she was going to say and do, and yet when she had mentioned an exhibition on Gaunt’s printmaking at one of the galleries in town he had suggested that they go together. He could not have explained why, but as soon as he had seen Florence he had known that he was going to speak to her about his aspiration.

  It had been a long time since he had tried confessing to anybody what he wanted. It never went well. They didn’t understand when he told them that the aspiration had been folded inside him long before he could put a name to it, and that he had spent years pretending he was like everyone else, years in which no plan worked out for him and he started getting migraines which left him blind and speechless. They always got the same look on their faces, as if they thought he’d made a joke so tasteless they could not have heard it right. For most people, what he wanted was just about the worst fate they could imagine. As a desire they found it unthinkable; their skin crawled. It wasn’t even real, the Flâneur – it was just some folklore nightmare, some hallucination generated by the city. Why would you dream of seeking it out? That ancient, lonely thing, wandering the city forever in search of someone to whom it could speak its tale. No one knew what that story was, or what happened to those who heard it, but everyone knew that if you listened you were lost. You would never be the same again.

  Weeks after the library, he and Florence had spent a bleak afternoon walking around Lizavet Heath while he tried to explain himself. As they skirted the pond, exposed between the damp dish of the heath and a low winter sky, she kept her overcoat wrapped around her small body and her gaze fixed on the rooftops, but she listened as he told her what his aspiration meant. He did his best to put it in terms she would find appealing. He said:

  ‘We’re always telling ourselves the story of ourselves, every waking moment, as if nothing matters more. Isn’t that a selfish way to live? Shouldn’t we try and get outside that?’

  He knew he was doing himself an injustice by phrasing it that way, but it was as close as he could manage. He wanted to tell her: the beauty of this broke my heart at sixteen and it still hasn’t finished breaking. But she turned her face to the grey disc of the water. She couldn’t understand why he would want to do something like that to himself, she told him, and she didn’t want to talk about it any more. Walking away, she said: ‘You sound as though you don’t want to be here at all.’

  He thought that would be the end of it with Florence. As she moved past and left him standing by the pond, he was at a loss to understand why he had even tried. And yet when he left the heath she was waiting for him at the gate; she took his hand and asked him to walk her back to the house, and when they reached the three steep stone steps that led up to her front door she said she was going to take him out to dinner. She telephoned to make reservations at a restaurant on the Mile.

  Later they walked through the Esplanade as the daylight failed. Simon offered his elbow and Florence folded her arm through it, taller than him in her heels. He was wearing a high-collared overcoat that she had found for him in one of her upstairs rooms, and he felt old-fashioned and graceful strolling among the carnation sellers with pigeons fussing around their feet. In the restaurant, a tiny underground place with three foreign waitresses who tended to them approvingly, they drank a whole bottle of red wine and found themselves talking a good deal. They did not mention his aspiration. She took him home in a taxi, led him up the steps of the house and pinioned him in the bed. Her mouth tasted of tannin and to his surprise they were not disappointed.

  Thirst woke him early the next morning, with Florence curled towards him in the sheets sleeping deeply and giving off a powerful warmth. The room was bright because they had not closed the curtains, and he watched as a magpie arrived on the windowsill, snatched some morsel and leaped out of sight. For a while he lay there and tried to gauge the severity of his headache.

  Ignoring the grey cat’s keening, he went down to the hall, the timbers of the staircase popping under his feet. His migraine had not subsided. It was a sinuous thing which now opened its poisoned veils all through his head, now shrank into a pebble in his eyeball. No one could have blamed Simon if he’d gone back into the bedroom, drawn the curtains and given up on the day, but he refused to admit defeat. The season was here and his aspiration was within reach.

  In the parlour Florence sat curled on the sofa, holding the black-and-white kitten against her chest. Her forearms were goosefleshed and her hair hung as if she had just dried it with a towel. She had been listening to music, it seemed, and a record still turned on the gramophone, the needle popping and crackling along the rim. Simon hated the corroded brass horn: its gross organic shape sprouting in the corner was so obsolete it was beyond ridiculous. It was like living with his grandmother, but along with everything else, Florence had inherited a superb vinyl collection – opera and lieder, piano concertos and string quartets – and she would never be able to give that up and start her own.

  As Simon hesitated in the parlour doorway, torn between saying something and pressing on for the front door, the kitten wriggled free, dodged around his feet and sprinted upstairs. The fat ginger cat lifted its head and projected a perfect lack of interest from its copper-green eyes. The record crackled on. Florence took a cushion and drew her knees up around it, retreating deeper into the sofa, and Simon suppressed an impulse to cross the room and kick over the side table. All of this might have been planned specifically to prevent him from leaving. He wanted to ask if it was so hard for her to summon a couple of words or just a smile of assent; but she had never once given him that. He wasn’t sure she would even recognise the idea. He marvelled, not for the first time, at how neatly she could put him in the wrong.

  The elderly animal wailed from upstairs. Florence flinched, and Simon knew what she was thinking: the poor thing was suffering and she didn’t know what to do, it couldn’t clean itself any more, could barely eat without help; maybe she should ask the vet again; it was all too much to cope with. He saw these anxieties swell through her mind, then ebb as she returned to the main task of de
nying him any scrap of approval, of permission, before he left. His eye was a lump of gristle implanted in his head but he paid it no attention.

  She could seem like a lonely spinster with the stink of catfood through the place and the shed hair everywhere. There was an atmosphere of shame about her empty house and its sodden, sunken garden where wrens flickered their tails and skipped tauntingly from the sills to the branches and back. If he stepped into the room, he could sit down and slide towards her along the cool, glazed cloth of the sofa, holding out his arms until their ribcages bumped like teacups. She would let him hook his chin over her shoulder to gaze into the warped gloss of the windowpane and the mass of tree-fingers beyond. She always let him, if he tried. A throb went through his back teeth and all at once he was desperate to get outside and walking, not having to think about Florence sitting in her parlour with her cats. It was time to go.

  Florence drew a deep breath and dared another look into Simon’s eyes. He opened his palms to her helplessly. The ginger cat made an approving noise.

  ‘Don’t go,’ she said. ‘Stay here.’

  It took him a moment to make sense of the words. He opened his mouth, pushed the heel of his hand into his left eye and laughed at how completely she had failed to understand him. Then, shaking his head, he walked out of the house.

  He could not understand how she had drawn him into the life of these past years. It was as if she had never doubted that he would join her for walks and shopping trips and cinema outings, that she was qualified to lace her fingers in his and lay her head on his shoulder, that he would let her cook him dinner in the evenings and would stay with her afterwards – and without quite knowing why, he had allowed her to carry on believing all this. He was good at the deception, talking with every sign of enthusiasm about the books and films she liked, making her laugh with his wry remarks when they went people-watching. He even took her into town and helped her buy some new clothes. He waited for her to notice how bored he was – that wherever his heart might be, it was not here – but she saw nothing. To dissolve her contentment would have been so easy that he couldn’t bring himself to do it, even when he was ready to scream at her for the way she had entangled him.

  One afternoon they parted on Ectarine Walk after she had spent half an hour debating with herself whether she dared make an expedition across the city to the Strangers’ Market. She wanted to browse the bookstalls, but feared that the effort of doing so might prove too much for her; she could not make up her mind. Simon had listened in mounting disbelief, his expression portraying concern, and he had asked sympathetic questions just as if he had nothing more important to worry about. Once she had disappeared into the house his face twisted into an ugly mask which churned on his skull all the way along the street.

  And yet a few days later he went with her to the Market. Having finally made the decision, she was in a good mood, and as they surveyed the paperbacks she waved at the bald, flaccid man behind one of the smaller tables.

  ‘I always find something here,’ she said. ‘Henry has good taste.’

  Astonishingly, the man lowered his eyes and shuffled his feet, his patchily shaven jowls wobbling. Simon had not imagined she could produce such a response even from so raddled a specimen. As Florence took her time over the stall, the man’s loose grey tongue pressed out between his varnished teeth and his eyes stayed on her. She glanced up and threaded a strand of hair behind her ear. When she looked away again the man’s face turned to Simon and twitched in a sort of pantomime, servile and insinuating at once, as if he was trying to share some lecherous joke. Simon was surprised by how badly he wanted to overturn the stall and break that pendulous nose; but then he saw that Florence had moved to another stall, and he hurried after her without replying. The fat man’s expression crumpled as he watched them leave.

  The next time Simon was walking in Glory Part, fingers grasped his elbow, an oniony sweat smell enclosed him and the same sorry character greeted him like a bosom friend. It was a good thing they’d met again, he said, breathing heavily, because last time they had been interrupted. As Simon permitted himself a silent laugh at the kinds of difficulties she could get him into, the man launched into a story, some incoherent hard-luck tale about something bad which had happened to him: a mistake from which he had never recovered, the cause of his present state. Simon did his best not to hear, and after a few minutes he was able to get away by joining the flow of shoppers into the Part High metro – but he took with him the irrational unease that this meeting had somehow enmeshed him with Florence further.

  Soon enough she wanted him to move into the house on Ectarine Walk, and although he squirmed when she asked him he was penned in by guilty obligation. He had let her continue happily in her fantasies for so long now. Besides, he had nowhere to go – a malicious landlord had given him notice on his tenancy – and Florence’s house was big enough, too big: it was full of the impediments of the past, heavy furniture and leather-armoured books and brown oil paintings, and when you came in from the street the hall closed over you like woodland. The wallpaper was a diagram of an overgrown garden and a giant cobweb of shadow hung always across the upstairs landing. When he arrived with his rucksack he felt a tingle of excitement at the sense that these rooms might carry on unfolding indefinitely, that the house might be the secret entrance to an underground world of limitless dim galleries and stairs. Only as he was unpacking did he realise that if Florence’s house had offered an image of escape, it had been nothing but a lure.

  Living with her, he had grown baffled by the excuses she made for herself. In all this time he had never grasped what was really supposed to be the problem. The story, as far as he could make out, was that she had once had a viral infection and that ever since then she had been too tired to do anything. She suffered from an inconclusive catalogue of complaints – aching joints, the occasional fever – but all Simon knew was that she could lie despondent on the sofa for weeks on end.

  Her more active periods were even more irksome. She fretted continually about tiring herself out, and was always fussing with a notebook in which she wrote down everything she did; she appeared to believe that walking to the shops was an achievement worth recording. The transparency of her tactics infuriated him as much as their success. When it suited her, she could manage well enough to go on daytrips into town, or cook complicated meals and insist that he eat them with her sitting up at the drop-leaf table in the dining room, but after a few weeks she would remember how tired she was meant to be and retreat to the sofa again. It still took Simon aback that she could behave like this in front of someone with a genuine affliction, but he said nothing. Soon enough, he reminded himself, it wouldn’t matter.

  He ran down the front steps and set a smart pace along Ectarine Walk. Branches shook droplets on him as he walked, acid daylight stung his eyes and he thought of returning to Florence: he could apologise and lie in a darkened bedroom for the rest of the day, letting her press cool flannels on his forehead. He cursed himself for a faint heart and kept walking until he saw the green glass canopies of Lizavet Heath metro station.

  He bought a ticket and went down to the platform. When he was small, he had liked travelling on the metro, the tramcar jogging him along tracks that stitched themselves through the city and led off into the hidden maze of all the places you could go. He had tried imagining that one day he would own all the trams, so that all of those destinations would belong to him too, but the idea had not convinced him even briefly. It felt more like his father’s than his own. His father had been a limited man who had made a lot of money in property and, having no real personality, had settled for the usual pretence: bluff, hard-nosed, no-nonsense. For years he had behaved as though Simon was incapable of managing anything for himself, but later he had refused to support his son in the smallest way, laying down platitudes instead about how we all have to learn to stand on our own two feet. Then he had gone bankrupt.

  Simon rode the metro over to Sweatmarket station and clim
bed through chipped tiling and wet concrete up to the streets of Glory Part. He crossed a footbridge and turned down Sluice Lane. He had lived in digs near here for a couple of months, at one time, and had never forgotten it. The landlady had chewed raw garlic for her blood pressure. The kitchen had barely been large enough for an electric kettle, a hotplate and a cupboard smelling of mildew; there was a view of the canal. Sliding open the drawer, he’d discovered a lone fork, the tines bent in four slightly different directions and the handle stamped Not to be removed from hospital. In the early mornings that room had been bright, and crammed with a sense of promise so pure it was hard to bear, like a sound pitched at the limit of hearing.

  He was angry with Florence for spoiling his departure from the house. By rights, all he had to do was walk until the day ended – the afternoon was already dimming – and keep walking for as long as it took, a pilgrim thinking only of his journey, on faith, letting the rest of his life fall away. But instead he was rattled and distracted. She had done it again. To settle his mind he walked fast in no particular direction until he emerged from the alleys to the quays.

  The waterfront was in the process of redevelopment. They had laid tiny, pastel-coloured paving stones, planted blue bollards, and put up a bronze image of a stevedore hauling a rope. Most of the gutted buildings were dressed with scaffolding, but a few restaurants and shops were ready, their dim interiors poised for customers. The sky, overcast and unsettled, was opening itself in an endless slow gesture to the waves. The waterfront was empty except for a man slumped on one of the benches. Simon cursed: he had grown accustomed to ducking down the side streets of Glory Part whenever he saw that grey face approaching, but this time he was caught in the open. Before he could turn on his heel, the figure on the bench raised a hand and began to get up. Simon walked on past, ignoring the cry of abject greeting and the snagging of fingernails on his sleeve. As he hastened away from the quays the fat man shambled after him, still calling out as if to start a conversation.