Us

by Nicholls, David

  104. the macadamia

  After all that ancient stone, there was something pleasingly light and temporary about the wooden Accademia Bridge, and I took a moment to look east to the entrance of the Grand Canal, taking in the view. A strange phrase that, ‘taking in’, implying as it does some sustenance or retention. While I could admire the elegance and proportion of the scene, I was primarily aware of the mass of tourism around me, and also of the extraordinary confidence of the Venetian architects in allowing their finest buildings to teeter at the water’s edge. What about damp? What about flooding? Wouldn’t it make sense to have a little lawn or garden as a sort of buffer zone between the house and all that water? But then it wouldn’t be Venice, said Connie’s voice in my head. Then it would be Staines.

  I walked on and heard another voice. ‘How is that map working out for you?’ In foreign cities, I assume that anyone speaking to me wants money, and so I continued some way before turning and seeing the lady from the pensione’s breakfast room. I doubled back.

  ‘It’s serving me very well. You’re queuing for the Accademia?’ I asked, somewhat idiotically given that she was queuing for the Accademia.

  ‘Accademia,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Accademia, not Accademia. The desk clerk in the hotel corrected my pronunciation. First and third syllable. It’s Accademia. Like the nut.’

  ‘Sorry, which nut?’

  ‘The macadamia nut.’

  ‘No, you mean the macadamia nut!’ I said.

  I’m not sure the written word captures the full splendour of this comeback. I was so pleased that I found myself making a little whining noise in the back of my throat, and the woman smiled at the first nut-pronunciation joke in human history. It seemed unlikely that either of us could top the remark, so, ‘Enjoy the gallery!’ I said. ‘See you at breakfast!’ she replied, and on I strode towards Campo Santa Margherita, where I gorged on a slab of pizza, greasy and delicious, and a litre of chilled sparkling water, then on, belching privately, to the exhaust fumes and bluster of Piazzale Roma in the fish’s mouth. Head to tail had taken me a little under three hours.

  But it was the body of the fish, San Paolo and Santa Croce, that defeated me, the blind alleys and dog-legs and compass-defying switchbacks. My map was useless here, and finding myself alone in a cool, exquisite courtyard, my response was not ‘what grace, what beauty’ but ‘what a pointless waste of time’. After an hour of dispirited wandering, I struck south to the open promenade of the Zattere, the fish’s pelvic fin. On floating pontoons the tourists were eating gelati but I was behind schedule now, and in very low spirits by the time I approached La Salute, where I slumped on the marble steps near the spot where I had proposed to Connie on a winter’s night, twenty-two years ago. Now a young busker stood there, Albie’s age, singing an Oasis song, written before he was born, the words learnt phonetically and stripped of their consonants.

  ‘Un mayee, ure gonna be uh-un uh safe mee …’

  I missed my wife and wondered how long she would remain so. I missed my son and despaired of ever finding him and bringing him home. I pressed the heels of my hands into the sockets of my eyes.

  ‘An afer awwww, ure my wunnerwaw.’

  Then I picked up my backpack, caught the vaporetto back to the tip of the fish’s tail, did the same thing all over again, and then once more.

  105. the plateau

  When I was a child, this is how I imagined married life to be.

  The day after the wedding, you begin to walk hand in hand across this great wide plateau and in the distance ahead there are scattered obstacles, but there are also pleasures, little oases, if you like – the children that you will have and who will grow healthy, loving and strong, the grandchildren, Christmas mornings, holidays, financial security, success at work. Failures, too, but nothing that will kill you. So there are ups and downs, undulations on the plain, but for the most part you can see what’s coming up ahead and you walk towards it, the two of you hand in hand for thirty, forty, fifty years, until one of you slides over the edge and the other one follows soon after. Looking up from the viewpoint of a child, that was how marriage seemed.

  Well I can tell you now that married life is not a plateau, not at all. There are ravines and great jagged peaks and hidden crevasses that send the both of you scrabbling into darkness. Then there are dull, parched stretches that you feel will never end, and much of the journey is in fraught silence, and sometimes you can’t see the other person at all, sometimes they drift off very far away from you, quite out of sight, and the journey is hard. It is just very, very, very hard.

  Six months after our wedding, my wife had an affair.

  106. the guy at work

  I’m not sure how much I can say about the affair, because I wasn’t there. Infidelity is much easier to discuss from the participants’ point of view. They have the looks and smiles and secret touches, the beating hearts, the thrill and the guilt. The betrayed know nothing of this, we’re just fulfilling our responsibilities in happy ignorance until we stroll into the plate glass.

  Neither can I offer an intriguingly tangled web of hints, clues and gradual realisations. There were no mysterious phone calls, no mislaid credit-card slips for restaurants that I’d never been to, no detective work on my part at all. I found out because Connie told me, and had she not confessed I would not have found out. She told me without preamble on a Saturday morning, resting her head against the cupboard because she didn’t know what to do.

  ‘What to do?’ I said.

  ‘What to do next.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About Angus.’

  ‘Angus?’

  ‘Angus, my friend, the guy at work.’

  Apparently there was a guy at work – he was always a ‘guy’, which irritated me – an artist who had recently exhibited at the gallery where she now worked full time. Working late, they had drunk a little wine and kissed, and she had thought about that kiss a lot, and so had this Angus, this guy, and the following week they had gone to a hotel.

  ‘A hotel? I don’t understand, you’re here every night, you’re always here! When did you—’

  ‘One afternoon. Two weeks ago. Christ, Douglas, have you really suspected nothing? Have you really not seen the change?’

  I had not. Perhaps I was unobservant, or insensitive, or complacent. We had not made love as frequently as before but that was hardly unusual. Wasn’t this marriage’s oldest joke? We were meant to be trying for a baby but if we had lost some of our initial zeal for that project, was that really a surprise? And yes, there had been moments where Connie had seemed a little distant, uncommunicative, distracted, times when we shuffled around the kitchen sink together like colleagues on a morning tea break, times when I fell asleep to the sound of her uneven breathing instead of asking what was wrong. But I was working very hard in those days, extremely hard, through the night sometimes in order to complete one project while securing funding for the next, and there were limitless demands on my time and my attention.

  Well, she had my attention now. I am not an especially passionate man. Months, years go by without me raising my voice, and I think people sometimes misinterpret this as docility. But when I do lose my composure – well, a fitting analogy would be the difference between kinetic and potential energy, between the flow of a river and a dam that’s about to burst. Good God, the memory of that awful weekend; the shouting and the tears and the punched walls, the awful circular argument. Why had she done it? Was it because she loved him? No, not really. Did she still love me? Yes, of course she did. Then why? Was it because she loved him? No, not really and so on and so on late into the night. The neighbours complained, but not because of the dancing this time. By the second day the shock and rage had dissipated somewhat, and we were staggering from room to room, insensible and incoherent. We left the house and walked along the Regent’s Canal, somewhere new to be unhappy. Why had she done it? Was she bored? No, or only occasionally. Un
happy? No, or only sometimes. She sometimes wanted, she said, to feel younger, wanted something new. Change. Then did she want the marriage to continue? Yes, absolutely yes! Did she still want children? Yes! Children with me? Yes, more than anything. Then why had she …?

  By Sunday night we were exhausted. Those two days were like some awful fever and I suppose we hoped, by the end of it, that the danger had passed. Nevertheless I insisted that Connie sleep elsewhere, dispatching her to Fran’s, because wasn’t this the convention? The suitcase, the waiting taxi? I did not want to see or hear from her until she’d made her choice.

  But no sooner had the taxi pulled away than I wanted to run after it and wave it down. Because I had a terror that once banished, she might never return.

  107. phone call from connie

  ‘Did I wake you?’

  ‘A little bit.’

  ‘I don’t think you can wake someone a little bit, can you?’

  ‘I mean I was just dozing off. There’s a time difference, you know.’

  ‘Of one hour, Douglas! I’m sorry, do you want to go back to sleep?’

  ‘No, no, I want to talk to you.’ I levered myself further up the swampy bed. Eleven o’clock.

  ‘I know I wasn’t meant to call you, but—’

  ‘Connie, is there news?’

  ‘No news. I take it you’ve not found him yet.’

  ‘No, but I will.’

  ‘How do you know, Douglas?’

  ‘I have my methods.’

  She sighed. ‘I’m still texting him once a day. Nothing melodramatic. Just “please call, we miss you”.’ There was an artificial precision to her voice that suggested she had been drinking, the vocal equivalent of walking in a straight line for a policeman. ‘I’ve told him we’re both in England. Not a word back, Douglas.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean he’s not okay. It just means that he’s still punishing me.’

  ‘Us, Douglas, both of us.’

  ‘You’ve done nothing wrong. It’s me.’ She did not contradict me. ‘If you do hear anything, don’t tell him I’m here. Ask him where he is but don’t say I’m looking.’

  ‘I’ve checked his email, his Facebook account too. Not a word.’

  ‘How can you check those? I thought he kept that private.’

  Connie laughed. ‘Please, Douglas. I am his mother.’

  ‘Where are you now?’ I asked.

  ‘On the sofa. Trying to read.’

  ‘Anyone know you’re home?’

  ‘Only the neighbours. I’m lying low. How’s the hotel?’

  ‘A little bleak, a little damp. You remember that old fish tank that Albie refused to clean? It smells like that.’ Down the line, I heard her smile. ‘The mattress sort of sucks you in.’

  ‘What’s that noise?’

  ‘That’s the hotel boiler. It’s okay, it only happens whenever anyone runs a tap.’

  ‘Oh, Douglas, come home.’

  ‘I’m fine, really.’ A brief pause. ‘How’s our stupid dog?’

  ‘He’s not stupid, he’s complicated. And he’s fine. Happy I’m back.’

  ‘How’s the weather?’

  ‘Rainy. How is it in Venice?’

  ‘Hot. Humid.’

  ‘It’s funny, I can only ever think of Venice in the winter.’

  ‘Yes. Me too.’

  ‘I’m sorry not to be there.’

  ‘You could fly out?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘I found our spot today. Where I proposed to you. You remember?’

  ‘It rings a bell.’

  ‘I didn’t seek it out. It wasn’t a pilgrimage, it was on my route.’

  ‘That’s fine. I’m sorry I wasn’t there with you.’

  ‘Yes, we could have laid a wreath.’

  ‘Douglas—’

  ‘I’m kidding. It’s, whadyacallit, dark humour.’ Some time passed. ‘You don’t regret it, do you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Saying yes.’

  ‘I don’t think I did say yes, did I?’

  ‘Well, eventually you did. After I’d worn you down.’

  ‘I did. And I haven’t regretted it for a moment. Don’t let’s talk about it now. I only phoned to say I miss you.’

  ‘I’m glad. And now I must go to sleep.’

  ‘And Douglas? I appreciate what you’re doing. I think it’s a little mad, but it’s … admirable. I love you.’

  ‘Are we still saying that?’

  ‘Only if it’s true.’

  ‘Well then, I love you too.’

  108. aching

  I did not fall asleep until six, then woke at seven to discover that my knee joints had ossified. My hips ached as if I’d been struck by a car, so it took me some time and a great deal of groaning and sighing to clamber from the sucking maw of my mattress and sit on the edge of the bed. I had sweated feverishly in the night, the bedding now damp enough to propagate cress, and I drained the bedside glass of water and stumbled, hunched, to the tiny sink to drink again and again. On examination, my feet were monstrous, as moist, pale and bony as a vacuum-packed pig’s trotter. Angry water-filled blisters had formed at heel and toe. Clearly it was absurd to think that I could walk the same circuit three times today, or even once. I would have to rethink my plans, find key thoroughfares and lie in wait. The Rialto, the Accademia Bridge, the western entrance to St Mark’s – surely Albie would funnel through there at some point. I stuck useless plasters to the worst of the corns and blisters, descended with a robot’s gait to the breakfast room, filled bowls with tinned peaches and dusty muesli and lowered myself carefully into a chair.

  ‘Ow … ow … ow.’

  ‘So, did you succeed?’ said the woman.

  ‘Succeed?’

  ‘In seeing all of Venice in one day?’

  ‘I think so. Which is why I can’t move my legs. How was the … Accademia? Did I say that right?’

  ‘Beautifully. I didn’t go in the end. Coach parties arrived before me and I hate peering over people’s shoulders. There were just too many tourists. Me included, of course.’

  ‘The tourist’s paradox: how to find somewhere that’s free of people exactly like us.’

  ‘Though of course, like every tourist, I think of myself as a traveller.’ We smiled at each other. ‘Perhaps I was naïve, but I really wasn’t prepared for the crowds.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve only ever been here in winter.’

  ‘Perhaps August was a mistake. Verona was the same.’

  ‘Very busy.’

  ‘You were in Verona too?’

  ‘Only for two hours. I was changing trains.’

  She exhaled and shook her head. ‘I made the mistake of seeing Juliet’s balcony. I don’t think I’ve ever been more depressed in my life.’

  ‘Me too! I felt the same way.’

  ‘I practically wanted to hurl myself off it.’ I laughed and, encouraged, she leant forward. ‘You’re on the way to …?’

  I’m looking for my estranged son.

  ‘I’m not sure yet. I’m … following my nose.’

  We lapsed into silence for a moment. Then …

  ‘I feel foolish shouting across the room like this,’ she said. ‘Do you mind if I join you?’

  ‘Not in the least,’ I said, folding my map to make room.

  109. freja kristensen

  I suppose this was why some people travelled, to meet new people, though this has always been a vexed area for me. Conversation, the gradual unveiling of oneself, one’s quirks and characteristics, opinions and beliefs; what a fraught and awkward business that is. Connie had always been the gregarious one, and I was inclined to let her meet new people on my behalf. But this woman was sitting diagonally opposite me now, and I had little alternative but to offer my hand.

  ‘I’m Douglas. As in the fir.’ A weak joke, I know, but one that might have special resonance for a Scandinavian.

  ‘My name is Freja, but I’m afraid I can’t think of a pun to go with that.’ />
  ‘How about Deep-fat Freja!’ I said in time to hear the voice inside my head scream, ‘No!’ We fell into a somewhat shocked silence and, in a panic, I was obliged to comment on her breakfast.

  ‘Cheese for breakfast – I’ve always thought that was a very European thing, cheese and salami.’

  ‘You don’t have that in England?’

  ‘No. To eat cheese at breakfast would be quite taboo. Likewise the cucumber and tomato have no place on our morning table.’ Good God. Talk normally, you bloody fool.

  ‘Though in fairness, you can hardly call this cheese.’ She dangled the pale, perspiring square between finger and thumb. ‘At home we have this same material tiling my bathroom floor.’

  ‘There appear to be chocolate chips in my muesli.’

  ‘The world has gone mad!’

  ‘It’s not the greatest hotel in Venice, is it?’

  Freja laughed. ‘I thought it would be fun to travel on a budget, but roughing it is always more enjoyable in theory than in practice.’ Roughing it; she spoke very good English. ‘I was told my room had air-conditioning but it sounds like a helicopter landing. Yet without it I wake each morning and have to peel the wet sheets off me.’

  There seemed to be something slightly lewd about this revelation, so I moved on. ‘Where are you from, Freja?’

  ‘Copenhagen.’

  ‘You speak wonderful English.’