Damascus

by Richard Beard

  ‘It’s good to have a hobby,’ her Dad says, too busy to see it’s not a collection.

  It is now early evening on an overcast Monday in November, and it seems a long time since Hazel’s last adventure in crime. Sitting in a new and bigger (Dad is Salesperson of the Year ‘93: china cormorants) but otherwise familiar front room, Hazel watches her mother hunched over the desk scrutinising recent bank statements from Lloyds or Midland or Natwest or the TSB. Hazel stays well out of range, sorting phonecards in thematic order on the coffee table. She asks if anything shows up yet.

  ‘I can’t see anything.’

  ‘If he was having an affair it would show up somewhere in his bank statements.’

  Hazel’s mother is in need of drugs, of tranquillisers or uppers or downers. She angrily swipes a stack of statements off the desk and yells at Hazel.

  ‘You know a damn sight too much, young lady! Go to your room!’

  And then just as suddenly her face creases and she rushes over to the sofa to apologise. Hazel keeps on grouping the cards because these mood-swings are nothing new, inspired as they are by the pills in the bathroom in packets marked Valium or Mogadon or Methydrine or Amitryptolene. They can make her mother lose track of what she’s supposed to be feeling. ‘Marriage is a ritualised alliance,’ she unexpectedly says. 'It’s like a sports team.’

  ‘Do sports teams make people happy?’

  ‘I never expected to be happy.’

  Hazel stands up. She says she’s going for a walk.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Fresh air. You know, the great outdoors.’

  ‘Don’t speak to me like that.’

  ‘To play in traffic, talk to strangers, the usual.’

  Her mother snatches up the newspaper and slaps it with the back of her hand. She hopes Hazel knows what she’s doing, because no-one wants to see her end up as the next Drug Coma Girl Dies girl.

  And with this familiar warning ringing in her ears Hazel pulls on her overcoat, stuffs a pocket full of miscellaneous phonecards, and steps out into a light drizzle which is always about to stop. She can take several different routes to a choice of phone-boxes, depending on whether she wants to walk through the new Wimpey or Barratt or McAlpine showhomes and out into the country, or past the MGM Warner UCI Odeon multiplex and from there into town. It doesn’t matter much because she knows all the routes by heart, and time passes uneventfully as she thinks of other things, like perhaps her mother is right and her father has love affairs all the time, or even worse, one big love affair which never ends. It seems unlikely, considering all the time he spends selling instant chicken soup in Jerusalem or yarmulkas in bulk to New York mayoral campaigns. Perhaps he’s having an affair abroad with someone who doesn’t speak English, if that counts, but it’s more likely that he’s simply far too busy. And besides, nothing shows up on his bank statements.

  She turns right at the multiplex showing The Piano and Mr Wonderful and The Fugitive and Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story. Decisions, decisions. Even though she’s only sixteen, Hazel has all sorts of decisions to make, like should she change her A-levels and does she want to take a gap year before going to University? Does she love Sam Carter? She sometimes sleeps with him, but this is mainly statistics: most girls her age are doing it. She hasn’t made the subsequent decision to turn it into love, which she believes is no more than a decision made or not made, depending on personal preference and the time of your life. No thunderbolts for her and Sam then, though Hazel often finds herself wishing for a more romantic type of romantic love, which would happen to her whether she liked it or not.

  She is now waiting outside the phone-box (a fumbling, bent-backed, white-haired old lady is inside, of the type Hazel routinely robs of a Saturday). It’s still raining but Hazel likes to wait in the rain. Being rained on is authentic, as is feeling a slight chill because this is November and winter’s on its way. In mild discomfort she senses the residue of real life which concentrates itself in the sharper pains reported every day of the week in newspapers. Real life is everything which isn’t her undramatic and comfortable existence, and she finds crime authentic precisely because it feels out of character. She often thinks back to the car crash, if only to reassure herself that at least once she knew a moment of real life sensation, but the crash also reminds her of Olive as she is now, swimming in championships, exploring waterfalls, trying to get in contact with a disabled luge team. She stays out late overnight and rolls home drank in the morning, sozzled on real life ever since she realised it made no difference whether she cared or not. In fact it makes a huge difference: not caring looks like a lot more fun.

  Out comes the old lady (‘All yours, my dear’) and in goes Hazel, sheltering inside the glass box with its glass sides, the rain needling its way past the scratches of Laura loves Gary 2 and Elliot Dies Tonight and Utd 1 QPR 1. The rain is in the trees and under the tyres of cars as Hazel arranges a selection of phonecards on top of the telephone. She likes to buy picture-cards showing minority sports (bowls, yachting, ice hockey, basketball), or famous British people no-one’s ever heard of (Edmund Blunden, Helen Sharman, Spencer Perceval, Alfred Mynn) or illustrated domestic advice (Phone Home!) or sometimes even poetry (wavering blue floor of a skiff in the field’s river softens a gash of red down the slant wreck of brick). Hazel always keeps the cards after they’re used up. Each one is like a solid artefact left over from her rebellion against her mother, as she carelessly talks to a stranger for dangerous ages which she can later take home and measure in units. If it wasn’t for her mother’s paranoia, Hazel could have made these calls from home. But her mother tends to listen in on the extension, convinced Hazel only ever speaks to drug-dealers or young men who mend motorcycles.

  She selects a card with a seagull on it advertising a holiday in Malta and feeds it into the machine. Spencer answers the phone himself and there are no introductions, no hums and has, just him talking and her talking, his words and hers spinning each other to ground. They talk about yesterday, today, tomorrow, they play games, they gravely and not so gravely discuss the meaning of life. Hazel wants to know if Spencer thinks she should take a gap year, and then has to explain what it is.

  'Is this before or after we meet up?’ Spencer wants to know.

  But Hazel isn’t going to risk ruining it all by actually meeting him. Spencer will take one look at her body and her blonde hair and he’ll want to put it in, just like all the others. Instead she tells him that the real meaning of destiny, the way they both keep moving round the country, would be a chance meeting in a place neither of them had ever been before. ‘We probably wouldn’t even recognise each other.’

  ‘Of course we would.’

  ‘Why would we?’

  ‘We just would.’

  ‘You know why I like talking to you, Spencer?’

  ‘Because I ravish you with my voice.’

  ‘Because we don’t have to worry about sex. We can just be friends, really just friends, and nothing gets in the way of that.’

  Sometimes, although rarely, silences come between them.

  11/1/93 MONDAY 11:48

  Time for Maths, financial special. There was a mathematical difference between the interest calculations made for gilts, bonds, and German bunds. There was a way to calculate yields by using consensus forecasts of expected inflation. Using the ex-MIPS measure, real yields on long gilts could be calculated by subtracting current inflation from nominal yields.

  ‘Are you following any of this?’

  ‘Not a word.’

  Hazel stood up and turned it off.

  ‘What we need is a good film,’ William said. ‘The skipper of a merchant vessel vows revenge when his ship is sunk by a U-boat in a neutral port.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘You know the kind of thing.’

  Along with the television, the room’s token furniture included a single bed, a chair, and the Rowlandson Hazel had noticed earlier. William had closed the curtains, but otherwise he’d recovered from
the more obvious effects of his panic attack.

  ‘I was hoping we could have a chat,’ Hazel said.

  ‘About Jessica?’

  Hazel rolled her eyes at the name, but yes, it was Jessica she wanted to chat about. She wanted to know where she really stood with Spencer. If he was in love with someone else then she was only fooling herself by staying. It also made sense, now that she knew he was coming, to leave before Henry Mitsui arrived. Or Mad Henry, as she used to think of him when he was still her student.

  She went to the curtains and parted them slightly to look down at the road.

  ‘Well go on then,’ William said. ‘Open them if you want to.’

  She hesitated and William came over and opened them himself. He looked grimly down at the grey street.

  ‘I was expecting another panic attack,’ Hazel said.

  ‘Not through a window. It’s the same as watching television.’

  ‘Tell me what you see.’

  ‘Some parked cars. Some cars moving. People. Shops. Jepson’s Piano Sale Not On.’

  Hazel interrupted him, realising he’d just found a way to cure himself. All he had to do was step outside and pretend that everything was television.

  ‘Tried it,’ William said.

  ‘And?’

  ‘JEPSON’S PIANO SALE NOT ON!! There turned out to be a difference between real life and television.’

  Hazel pointed out her car, and thought of home and a change into more comfortable clothes. It was supposed to be easier than this, more certain. One of the main advantages of Spencer’s Damascus, if it ever happened, was that afterwards there couldn’t be a great deal of doubt involved.

  ‘You know what you were saying earlier?’ William asked, hoping she remembered. When she didn’t reply he sniffed and wiped at his nose. ‘About me going outside. You said it wasn’t such a big problem.’

  ‘That’s what I said.’

  ‘Did you mean it?’

  ‘Tell me about Spencer and Jessica.’

  'I couldn’t,’ William said. ‘I can’t. I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘Tell me what she’s like.’

  ‘Honestly?’

  ‘Honestly.’

  ‘She’s just about perfect.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘Well that would explain a lot of things,’ Hazel said, not really knowing what it explained.

  ‘He gets on your nerves, doesn’t he?’ William said.

  Hazel watched two women having a chat in front of the music shop. ‘I wanted him to be nicer.’

  ‘He didn’t tell you about Jessica, did he?’

  'I thought if we got through today we might be alright.’

  ‘I know the feeling,’ William said. 'It looks like we both picked the same special day.’

  ‘I was certain we could make a go of it.’

  ‘Nothing’s certain. People get hit by lightning.’

  ‘Maybe I should go home,’ Hazel said, and then: ‘Why is everyone so frightened all the time?’

  The end of the century was turning everyone into her mother, and it made Hazel furious. If Spencer wasn’t so frightened he wouldn’t be so pathetic and ineffectual, refusing to commit himself to the other side of the road for fear of being ran over. Chicken.

  ‘About Jessica,’ Hazel started again, but this time William interrupted her.

  ‘You really think I could go outside? Nobody else seems to think so.’

  ‘Who’s nobody else?’

  ‘My brother. Spencer. They say I can’t get to grips with the present tense. They say it’s all changed since my day.’

  ‘Not that much.’

  ‘But it is more difficult now, isn’t it?’ William said. ‘It’s more violent out there, more unpredictable.’

  ‘It is in films.’

  ‘No, in real life.’

  ‘You mean in newspapers.’

  'I mean in real life.’

  Hazel knew what William meant, but she didn’t agree with him. Unsavoury things happened, of course they did. They were in the news every day and they were invincible, but the light they shed was unequal to their prominence. At least she hoped this was true, because otherwise how would people get anywhere? Where would they find the courage to move on?

  ‘Could you really help me go outside?’ William said. ‘Do you really believe I could do it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Hazel said. ‘I haven’t got time. I think I’d better go home now.’

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘There’s not much point staying.’

  ‘About Jessica,’ William said. ‘This is important. When I said she was perfect, that isn’t exactly what I meant.’ He stopped and winced, as if the words he wanted to use were all nastily misshaped. ‘Not that she isn’t perfect, of course.’ He put both hands on top of his head and walked to the other end of the room and back again.

  ‘William, are you feeling alright?’

  ‘The thing is, I mean the true thing is, she doesn’t exist.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘We made her up. She’s a figment of our imagination. That’s why she’s perfect. She has every colour hair and any kind of eyes. She’s tall, short, a super-brain, thick as can be. It’s because she’s anything we like that’s she’s always perfect. See?’

  ‘You mean there is no Jessica.’

  ‘Well there is a Jessica, yes, but she’s not real.’

  ‘Which is exactly what Spencer told me.’

  ‘It’s my fault. It was me who kept bringing her up. I wanted to put you off.’

  ‘Why?’

  'I was frightened of you. I didn’t want you to take Spencer away.’

  ‘And what changed your mind?’

  ‘You said you could help me.’

  ‘Come over here,’ Hazel said. ‘Take a look at this.’

  There was no Jessica. This didn’t mean she forgave Spencer everything, but at least it was a start. She went over to the Rowlandson and waited until William was standing behind her, looking at it over her shoulder. It was a simple drawing of an eighteenth-century highwayman robbing a carriage, but for some time the two of them looked at it attentively and without saying anything, as if, like abstract painting, it had something important to tell them which they could never hope to find out for themselves.

  Hazel told William to describe it.

  ‘What?’

  ‘What you see.’

  It’s once upon a time, he reckons, a century or so ago. A mounted masked highwayman with a pistol leans into the window of a two-seater horse-drawn carriage. He threatens a fat prosperous man whose hysterical wife offers up a gold necklace and begs for mercy. The coachman, or it might be another thief, sits on one of the two horses harnessed to the carriage, holding them still with a whip. There are some clouds in the background and some bushes in the foreground.

  ‘That’s it,’ William said. ‘Why?’

  ‘Who made the carriage?’ Hazel asked him. William shrugged, and then she asked him what was the name of the highwayman and how much did a horse cost and what was the name of the horse? Was the painting an original? When was it painted and how much was it worth and who painted it? How old was he and was he married and did he have any children? What were their names then?

  ‘I have no idea,’ William said. ‘It’s just a picture on a wall.’

  'The point is,’ Hazel said, ‘you don’t have to know everything about it to know what’s going on.’

  Sometimes it was better not to know, she said, and to block off large sections of life. It wasn’t a case of pretending they didn’t exist, just of realising they weren’t always immediately relevant.

  'Isn’t that a bit sad?’

  ‘Some things you just have to ignore,’ Hazel said.

  ‘And you think this could work for me, when I go outside?’

  ‘You mustn’t let real life overwhelm you.’

  ‘You’re right,’ William said. ‘And I’m sorry. But sometimes I find it overwhe
lming.’

  It is the first of November 1993 and somewhere in Britain, in Kettering or Glasgow or Worksop or Porthmadog, in Goring-by-Sea or Andover or Rochdale or Ely, Spencer Kelly is testing his final assessed project from his favourite GCSE. He has perfected it over the summer in remote phone-boxes, a different one each time, and to cover his movements he sometimes cycles miles into the countryside.

  He waits until he’s inside the phone-box before taking it out of his Adidas or Umbro or Diadora sports bag. The device has two connected steel pincers which he fits round the side of the phone. Where the pincers hinge there is a hole into which Spencer screws a steel bar. He aligns this with the lock in the middle of the cashbox and begins to tighten it using a jack-handle. As he waits for the lock to give way under pressure, he reassures himself that these days nobody uses public phones except old poor people and teenage lovers. He therefore isn’t hurting anybody and it’s hardly even a crime. Originally it wasn’t even his idea. He was inspired by an Act of God, and that’s the honest truth.

  The first time: he is using a phone-box in a lay-by beside a wide expanse of agricultural land. It is cold, Novemberish weather and in the recently ploughed fields seagulls flock and caw over the turned earth. Spencer runs out of money. Hazel is disconnected, and like every other time there’s something very important Spencer still has to say to her. He curses and thumps the phone, and suddenly coins start pouring out of the return slot, faster and faster, bouncing off the concrete floor like a jackpot. He collects all these coins which belong to no-one and phones Hazel back again. He talks to her for ages. He still doesn’t tell her whatever it was which was so important, but that’s not the point, is it?