by Matt Wilven
“I agree with most of what he said,” she says, “any humanitarian does, but I want to know how such a sentimental subject can take centre stage at a supposedly world-renowned physics conference. The bottom line is that he’s just another middle-aged man trying to validate his Messiah complex.”
I quickly look over my shoulder. The road behind us is clear. There must be someone just slightly out of sight because I still feel like we’re being followed.
“People eat that stuff up though, don’t they? It appeases their guilt.”
“The worst thing is that he’s filled with awe by a nature that doesn’t even exist. It’s like watching a mushroom cloud rising over London and saying how beautiful it is. His perspective makes no attempt to deconstruct what’s actually happing, or solve any real problems. Meanwhile people making breakthroughs in grand unification, superstring, inflationary cosmology – breakthroughs that will change the way we understand the universe forever – they’re being ignored.”
“You know, I’d still be looking at the world with seventeenth-century eyes if it wasn’t for you.”
She ignores this compliment and glances down at my lap. My hands are tightly gripping my thighs. I release them and try to find a relaxed stance but everything seems decentred and forced.
“His new-found respect for the planet is bullshit,” says Lyd, more conviction behind her anger now. “He has absolutely no idea what’s going on in the world, or how complicated its problems are. At a push he’s, what, a glorified mechanic, a pilot? Who cares what he thinks or if he’s had a vague, transcendental experience whilst sitting in a spaceship? He probably has a carbon footprint the size of Asia with all that rocket fuel and all those planes he takes to go and do his talks. And Eastern philosophy has been saying what he’s saying for thousands of years. Maybe he should have just read a few books and become an environmental activist. It’s such a naïve and pointless perspective.”
My usual response to Lyd’s anger would be to gently probe to see if there was something else upsetting her. This time, I simply nod in agreement because if there is something it’s probably me.
“You’re right,” I say, massaging the back of my neck with my dank right hand. “Completely right.”
We remain quiet for the rest of the journey. I try to sit as still as possible in order to attract no attention. I ban myself from looking in the mirrors. Nothing is following us, even if I feel it.
In the waiting room, twenty minutes after our appointment time, Lyd is still trying to get through a large bottle of mineral water. She’s extremely tense. I’m looking around, reading the health posters on notice boards and jigging my right leg.
We’re finally led into the ultrasound room by the same assistant as last time. The sonographer is different. She’s a mole-faced woman with a big nose, tiny-screwed up eyes, wrinkled lips and greasy brown hair. Her voice has a nasal quality.
“Sit down, lie down, get your feet up,” she says. “And pull that dress up. Let’s have a look at you.”
Lyd gets on the examination bed and hitches up her dress, resenting the speedy, matter-of-fact instructions because she thinks most medical professionals are sadists and that stripping people of their dignity and confidence is all part of a game they pretend they’re not playing.
The sonographer starts moving fast and explaining little. Within moments Lyd’s bulging stomach is covered in gel and the mole-woman is racing through a series of checks and measurements without explaining a single thing to us.
“If you’re thinking of finding out the sex today you can forget it,” she says. “Little blighter has its legs crossed.”
“Oh,” says Lyd, trying to sound disappointed instead of antagonistic.
“Maybe we could wait a couple of minutes?” I suggest.
“Could be two minutes, could be two weeks but I haven’t got time to find out,” says the sonographer. “Behind schedule as it is.”
“We know,” says Lyd.
Again, the sonographer sets off on a series of nozzle twists and writes little encoded notes on a form that I’m sneaking glances at but can’t decipher.
“There’s not much point getting a sonogram either,” she says. “It’s in a funny position. You won’t be able to see the face.”
“But you can tell if everything’s okay?” says Lyd. “It looks fuzzy. Why is it so fuzzy?”
“Everything’s fine… Fine, fine, fine. You can book again if you really want a clearer picture.”
“What’s that?” I ask.
My anxious tone peaks Lyd’s interest. She looks at the screen and tries to see what I’m seeing.
“What’s what?” asks the sonographer, eager to get through this as quickly as possible.
“That,” I say, pointing at the top half of the screen.
“That’s your baby,” she replies.
Lyd’s staring at me. My lower spine is trembling. I must be hallucinating. What I’m seeing can’t be what I’m seeing because what I’m seeing isn’t a baby. It’s something else: some kind of deformed mutant, a disfigured runt, a grotesque homunculus. A wave of nausea rushes through me. A cold sweat quickly follows.
Not now, I’m thinking. Not now.
Lyd has a disgusted look on her face, like my existence is contaminating the air and making it unpleasant to breathe. I look around the room, increasingly dizzy, and see a small metal bin over in the corner. I run towards it and drop down onto my hands and knees.
For a second it seems like it’s passed and I’ve just humiliated myself for nothing but when I look at the contents of the bin, at the disposed rubber gloves, paper towels and thin plastic condoms covered in lubricant, I’m suddenly dry heaving and retching. Deep undulations are curling through my spine and whipping out of my gullet. It’s not real vomit, it’s just air and drool, but it sounds harsh and insane.
SIX
In Plato’s allegory of the cave, Socrates describes underground prisoners who are chained up facing a blank wall. Above, a procession of people and objects pass before a fire and their shadows project down onto this wall. Over time the prisoners give names to these shadows and come to accept them as real things. They become more and more skilled at perceiving them and predicting the order of their procession. When one of the prisoners is freed and sees the source of the shadows and the world above, he realises that his fellow prisoners will never believe that they are only looking at a puppet show and that the real world is above them. They will think that his eyes have been ruined, that he no longer sees the truth. Socrates argues that, by default, the free man now understands that the body is the real prison and that truth lies beyond the material world. He does not discuss what would have happened to the man if he went deeper into the cave.
I wake up late, thirsty, with a headache. There’s a heat wave outside, trying to get in. My lithium tablets are on the bed. I fell asleep thinking about taking them again, feeling like I’d ruined everything.
Downstairs, Blackie is waiting for me at the sliding door. He pecks and pecks at it, trying to get my attention, but I ignore him. Birdsong is quietly bouncing off the walls and windows. I can’t deal with any of it today so I pull the blinds shut and go around the house closing all the curtains.
Staring at the living room ceiling, lying on the couch, I doze on and off all day, the house slowly warming through. I have no motivation to get up and I’m not tired enough to sleep. My consciousness weaves in and out of itself, hearing house noises and dream noises at the same time, neither here nor there, lost between spaces.
When it finally gets dark and the birds are asleep I feel a bit more awake. It occurs to me that Lyd might have contacted me via email. I go and check. She hasn’t. After deleting my junk mail, the message from *CHARLIE* (Subject: (24) Re: direct contact…) pops back into the folder. I decide to write him another message and stare at the flashing cursor in the blank message box. I type, Why are you doing this to me? and the moment I press the key for the question mark the sound of tiny feet pitter-p
atters across the ceiling above me.
In the baby’s room, I pull down the ladder. Looking up into the square of darkness, I no longer feel alone. As my head breaches the attic I smell the faint whiff of Charlie that permeates from all of his things. I turn on the torch, look around at his stuff and climb the rest of the way in. There’s definitely somebody up here.
I step over the small box of Christmas decorations and hear shuffling behind the pile of boxes where I discovered the abandoned chicks. I approach the corner the boxes create and shine the torch down the slope of the roof. My stomach flutters as the beam of light passes over a physical object which twists and morphs, forming strange colours and bumps, until my eyes finally understand that it’s a scrunched-up child: Charlie, sitting with his hands over his face. He’s wearing red dungarees, a blue T-shirt with thin neon stripes running through it and a pair of blue shoes with red laces. It’s the outfit he’s wearing in my favourite photograph of him, the one I keep in my wallet.
“Who are you hiding from?” I whisper.
When I speak he disappears and I hear running across the middle of the floor behind me. I follow the direction of the sound, slowly navigate the floor space with the torch pointing ahead of me and eventually find him again, this time beneath the wardrobe doors that are leaning against the sidewall.
When the light of the torch passes over his face he wriggles with excitement.
“Charlie? Why are you hiding?” I ask.
He disappears again and, behind me, I hear the sound of his feet running across the middle of the floor. I realise that he might be playing hide-and-seek so this time I put on a mock-spooky voice, count down from ten and narrate my journey to find him.
Listening for audible clues, I hear him squirming and writhing over by his old cot so I dramatically lengthen the game, pivoting around his position and raising the tone of my voice until he makes a thrilled squeal, at which point I sweep the beam of the torch onto him and cry:
“Got you!”
Again, he disappears and I hear him running through the darkness.
We play like this for close to twenty minutes. There aren’t all that many hiding spots but I know that his pleasure is mostly derived from the anticipation of waiting to be found so I try to make the build-up as tense and enjoyable as possible.
When I hear him behind the first pile of boxes again, I can’t resist. It feels like he’s really here, we’re really playing this game. Hope has taken root in me so, instead of raising the volume of my voice and springing towards him, I kneel down in front of him. I still haven’t seen his face. I have to see it but I daren’t. I rest the beam of the torch on his chest and take a few breaths.
I desperately want to reach out and hold him. I inch the beam up to his neck, the dip of his chin, but there’s no face, just blackness, death; a small black shadow scurries towards a crack in a roof tile and disappears. The attic is empty. I’m alone. There’s no running sound in the darkness. I sit in the attic for hours, just in case, but he doesn’t come back.
On the couch, it’s getting light and I can’t sleep. I’m haunted by his absence. Every time I get close to nodding off I hear him in the distance – a giggle, a squeal, running feet. I need him. More than ever. I can’t let go.
Hours? Days? All I know is that the heat wave continues, ignoring the closed curtains, moving through every object in the house, into every tiny space and crevice. I idle around – lying on the couch, leaning against walls, getting warmer, sweating, drinking water, questioning why I saw Charlie, thinking about why I want to see him again so much, wondering how the birdsong is getting through the walls and into my ears. Every peek through the curtains reveals a blackbird conspicuously close to the house. Now and again I hear the clicking sound of a beak pecking on the sliding door in the kitchen.
Outside is pure bombardment: light, heat, birdsong, blackbirds, huge buildings, millions of people, sweat, garbage, technology, decay, carbon dioxide, pot holes, chewing gum, coffee shops, pushchairs, mobile phones, double-decker buses, advertisements, cars, traffic lights, lamp posts, paving stones, tarmac, double yellow lines, clothing, faces, hair, train tracks, tunnels, barriers. Everything is unnaturally connected; welded, wired, waged. It’s all too much.
Inside, I might have a chance. Me and the house have a long-standing mutual dependency. Here, I’m not just a lost and hopeless man living in his partner’s house, I’m in a safe place, fighting to get through a dark time, taking an isolated opportunity to try to come to terms with some of the blind spots in my mind. If I stay here everything might work out. I just have to avoid going outside, where everything’s connected, where they’ll see that I’m not part of it all.
I sweat. I drink water. The couch becomes slightly moist. Darkness falls and rises. Birdsong quietens and swells. Distant traffic and plug sockets hum. Heat clings to everything. Time is completely unpunctuated until I finally hear the faint sound of scurrying in the attic. I stand up but have to stay still for thirty seconds while the blood rushes into my head and out again.
When I get up there Charlie is sitting in plain sight. He isn’t trying to hide from the beam of my torch. I can see his face. He’s smiling, glad to see me, wearing those red dungarees again. I drop to my knees and release a mournful groan. Emptiness and sadness twist in my guts. He begins to fade out of sight so I fight my feelings, rock my spine, clench my gut, rein everything back and force it down. When I’m done he’s still sitting there.
“Do you want Daddy to read you a story?” I ask, almost whimpering.
“No,” he says, definite, shaking his head.
The presence of this word, the reality of it, shocks me. I didn’t expect him to speak. Last time his movement made noises and he made a few reactionary sounds but it all lacked the immediacy of an independent mind choosing a word and projecting it at me. It could have all been in my head. But hearing him. Hearing his voice. It makes me see that he’s really here. He has wants and needs and I don’t know what they are.
“Do you want to play with your cars?”
“Make pictures,” he says.
My hands shake as I scramble through a couple of boxes, trying to remember which one his crayons and felt-tip pens are in. I eventually find them on top of some books underneath lots of his drawings and paintings.
There’s no paper so I rush down the ladder to the printer in my office. As I grab a few sheets I have a morbid moment of self-reflection where I imagine the pain of rushing up into an empty attic but he’s still there waiting patiently when I get back.
I put the blank pieces of paper in front of him and he begins scribbling. Lines and colours form on the page and I follow their appearance keenly, pointing the torch at the emerging picture so he can see.
I forgot how intensely honest and creative he is. There is no pause for thought in his drawing and colouring, no doubt or reflection. He is lost in the process. Not a single moment is wasted worrying about how his image will be perceived. This is art as id, image as dream, self as symbol, and it’s untainted by creative block, lack of focus or the pursuit of value.
When he is done he grabs the corner of the page and, without checking the image over, knowing that it is exactly as he intended, holds it out for me.
“Look,” he says.
I take the page from him and inspect it. It is a version of Lyd in stick man form. Her arms are open. Her big face is smiling. A large messy block of yellow starts in her belly and almost takes over the whole page. Above her there is a black scribble in the sky. Below there are green lines and a pair of hooked black lines.
“Is this Mummy?” I ask.
He nods but he isn’t looking at me. He’s busy drawing the next picture. It takes him a long time to finish. It’s another picture of Lyd. This time he only uses black. Lyd’s mouth is sad. Blackness is protruding from her stomach.
“This one’s not very happy, is it? Is there something wrong with Mummy?”
“Yes,” he says, nodding his head.
“Is she sad?”
He shakes his head.
“Is she poorly?”
He shakes his head again.
“What is it then?”
“Mummy doesn’t love Charlie,” he says.
“Of course she does.”
“Mummy loves baby, not Charlie.”
“That’s a horrible thing to say.”
“Baby’s going to die,” he says.
“Please, Charlie. Don’t say that.”
“Baby’s going to die.”
“Charlie, no,” I say, reaching for his shoulders.
The second I reach for him he doesn’t exist. His shoulders aren’t there. His felt-tip pens and crayons are scattered around on top of blank pieces of paper. There are no drawings anywhere. The pictures have gone. He’s taken them with him. I think I hear a little scratching sound behind a pile of boxes but when I look there’s nothing there.
The house is too hot. Outside is still impossible. The only thing that matters to me is seeing Charlie again. I decide to move up into the attic. This way, whenever he’s around, I’ll be there to see him straight away. I won’t miss a moment.
I take up an extension cable, plug in a small lamp and fashion a makeshift bed. I empty all the bottles I can find and fill them with water. I even fetch the mop bucket and bleach so I won’t need to visit the toilet more than once a day.
After putting all the tinned food that doesn’t need cooking in a bag I notice a yellow Post-It note at the back of the cupboard: If you can read this we need more food xxx. It jars me for a second. I forgot about Lyd’s notes. I close the cupboard door with a flinch.
When I’m all set up I feel safe. There are no windows for blackbirds to tap on and, although I can still hear it, the birdsong is quieter up here. Time – or its overabundance – is the only problem. The hours are long and uninterrupted. There’s no night or day. It’s endless.