by Albert Alla
An imaginary experiment, much like many my mother had signed me up for, came to mind: one of my mother’s colleagues had Leona and another girl in a room. My task was to go in, talk about anything but the shooting, and then fill out a questionnaire. However I ran the scenario, when I read that one of them had lost a brother, I guessed that it was the other girl simply because Leona looked so untouched by the worries of life.
Her uninterrupted grin on our first evening, or the time she asked me whether I was ticklish, her fingers between my shirt and my summer jacket; they popped into my mind while I searched for other signs: ready tears, prolonged silences, or perhaps some sort of emotional bravado. But instead, I saw her smile and the squashed spider, the way she pivoted on her toes whenever she walked into a new space.
I didn’t get her. I’d spent eight years in a different world and my hands still went damp whenever a conversation neared the shooting. But she could fuck her dead brother’s best friend, the one living person who’d seen him die, and curl into his arms as if he’d protect her. All of this without ever acknowledging that blood and death had seared a natural chain between us, each inch-thick stainless steel link welded to our skins.
It happened the day she asked me what school I’d gone to:
‘Hornsbury School,’ I said, looking away, my eyes feeling shifty all of a sudden.
‘Oh, were you there when it was still called that?’
‘Yes.’
‘They built a new building at the back,’ she said, her voice holding her usual rolling cadence. ‘It’s made of glass, with one tall spire. When you climb it, you can see through the whole building. Like if you were inside a stomach. And they renovated the old façade too. It looks really nice.’
‘Do you like glass buildings?’
‘It depends. I like it when they look like they’re moving,’ she said, and we started talking about modern architecture.
***
At noon the next day, Leona called me. I let the phone ring while I readied myself for the conversation I knew I had to have. Endings were never easy but I had to face things as they were.
I picked it up on the fourth ring, put the receiver to my ear, and inhaled deeply. There was a short silence on her side of the line, but then, as she heard me breathe out, she said ‘hello’ with her usual ebullience and I felt something shift, as though it were slotting into a different set of tracks.
‘I think I’ve read enough equations for the next month,’ I answered her with some of her enthusiasm.
‘I know what you mean. I had two full day shifts, and then I did a catering shift last night too. At a sweet Frenchman’s big house, not two streets away from yours. I think he likes having me, he always asks for me.’
The picture of a sweet French man wanting her at his house pushed me further into the moment. I couldn’t remember what I’d been thinking before she called.
‘Listen, I want to catch up with a friend in London tomorrow. She lives in Angel, five minutes from your brother. Let’s go see him! And then we could go see a show. Do you like musicals, or would you rather see a play?’
If the conversation had started differently, I’d have grown serious at that point, but as it was, my thoughts were running ahead, focused on the choice she’d given me – I didn’t want to give her the impression that I was a theatre sort of man.
***
I stood under the Oxford train station’s awning, while a cold breeze blew straight through the wool of my jumper, and a line of buses shook the air with their rambling engines. When I saw her emerge from a sea of bikes (in her vintage flower-print summer dress) and wave happily as soon as she saw me, I put the station’s asphalt and concrete to the side, and replaced it with the two of us: her scent, the smoothness of her skin, the lightness in her voice, and the flow of our conversation, the warmth of my hand in hers. It went to my head like a field of flowers in bloom. My fingers traced the line of her hips and I kissed the point of her cheekbone. Our hands parted once, when she went to the counter to get her ticket. From a distance, I watched her bare calves, her dress hang from her hips, her plaited hair brush the nape of her neck, and I looked around me, wanting to share my delight. At least two men were looking at her, I noticed and smiled.
And then she turned to glance at me – for half a second, I saw the line of her nose on her opened face, and I remembered Jeffrey’s profile when we were eleven. We were playing football in his garden, he was shielding the ball with his body, and he glanced at me over his shoulder. It only lasted an instant – then she was walking towards me, brandishing her ticket, and Jeffrey’s image was cast out of my mind.
Halfway through the train journey, while she was resting her head against my shoulder, I remembered my doubts. I turned my nose away from her hair, stuck it in my seat, and inhaled deeply. Then, turning back towards her, my eyes followed a power cable that ran between the trains and the green hills.
‘Eight years ago,’ I said, squeezing her hand, ‘do you remember? I was with my mother and you were with yours, at Tesco. Do you remember?’
‘The one in Summertown?’
‘No, the one in Witney. You were doing something with your leg. Some ballet.’
‘Oh, I used to practise everywhere. Mum says that I was trying pirouettes in the dentist’s waiting room when I was five.’
‘Why did you stop?’
‘I grew up, I guess, but I haven’t stopped… Sometimes in the garden, I take my shoes off, and…’ She slipped one shoe off and raised her leg with her toes pointed.
I chuckled. ‘I can definitely see you doing that… But do you not remember that day in the supermarket?’
‘Ah, no… We often went there. I don’t remember seeing you.’
Lest I fall back into our momentum, I tried the name we’d never mentioned:
‘It was right after Jeffrey died,’ I said.
For three seconds, her body stiffened. Her neck straightened, her fingers were crushing my hand, and her elbow was poking hard into my ribs.
‘Oh. Yes, I see,’ she said slowly, her voice harsh. ‘But no, I don’t remember.’
On those words, her body loosened again, suddenly resting as comfortably on mine as it had done before.
‘I remember the time you came skiing with us,’ she said, in her vagabonding voice, ‘and you fell off a slope, and ski patrol had to rescue you. How many times did that happen when you were living in Chamonix?’
And so the conversation righted itself, held up by its speed, like a motorbike swerving around a pothole.
***
Her mother called her just as we were reaching my brother’s. Mouthing ‘two minutes’, she waved me inside while she stayed on the street. Alone, I suddenly felt reticent. I rang the bell and waited. No one answered. Pulling out a piece of paper, I checked the number of the house against the one I’d jotted down. I rang again, and pushed the door at the same time.
I walked into a dark vestibule. Green wallpaper was peeling off bare walls. There was a pile of shoes behind the door. I put mine next to them, and trod on the once-grey carpet. A loud beat pulsed down the corridor. Following the sound, I reached a room with a sofa, its cushions scattered all over the floor. An eyeball changed colour to the rhythm of the music on a flat TV screen. And amongst the cushions, my brother lay on his back, his body spread into an X. His eyes were open.
‘Hey, James,’ I said.
He glanced at me, before he looked at the ceiling once again.
‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said. ‘Mum said you’d be coming.’
‘I tried to call myself, but I couldn’t get through.’
‘I don’t answer unknown numbers.’
He glanced at me again and, for a second, I saw him as he must see me: a creased-up twenty-six-year-old clinging to the way things were when I was seventeen.
‘I couldn’t leave a message either,’ I said. ‘Your box was full.’
‘I don’t listen to my messages.’
‘Can I sit down?’
>
‘Yeah, sure.’
I sat on a cushion, my back against the sofa.
‘Nice music. What is it?’
He kept silent, his eyes still on the ceiling. There was a damp smell of skunk in the air. A minute after my question, he spoke:
‘Fat Freddy’s Drop,’ he said. ‘They’re pretty good.’
We stayed silent for another minute, listening to the singer repeat the same line over and over again.
‘You like them?’ he asked.
‘Yeah.’ Through the music, I heard a shrill noise. ‘Someone’s ringing the bell,’ I said.
‘Okay.’
‘Should I get it?’
‘No, they’ll work it out.’
A few seconds later, I saw Leona come into the room beaming. She looked at me, ignoring the plea on my face. Her smile grew when she saw my brother.
‘James!’
His eyes shifted slowly towards her, but as soon as he saw her, his whole demeanour changed.
‘Leona!’ He smiled and stood up.
He wasn’t quite steady on his feet by the time she ran into his arms, but he managed to hold on. They seemed to ask and answer a dozen questions at once.
‘It’s been so long. How long? How are you? I’m expecting stories—’
‘—Why? Yes, good. Why, what? What are you doing here?’ he said.
‘I came with Nathan. I wanted to surprise you! How are you?’
‘You surprised me alright. Good. Day off today. How’s uni?’
I looked at them enviously. With Leona, my brother seemed less foreign. She came to sit next to me, resting her hand on my thigh, while they caught up with each other. From her questions, I glimpsed a side of my brother I didn’t know. I saw my father’s dry humour and my mother’s cheeky smile, the one she kept for her friends.
‘So, are you out of rehab for good?’ she asked, and I wanted to be able to ask that question in the same easy tones.
‘Yeah, I think so. Just smoking a little grass, but that never hurt anybody.’
I nodded thoughtfully, while she answered:
‘Depends how much you smoke!’
He laughed:
‘I’m still standing. It’s not a little grass that’s going to knock me down.’
She smiled at him:
‘I’m so glad to see you.’
At that moment, looking at her cocked head and sweet smile, at his grateful eyes, I felt like I could add my own:
‘Me too,’ I said.
He barely looked at me, but I was glad I’d been able to say it. We stayed chatting until I noticed a game console, and asked him whether we could play something.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Do you know how to play, Leona?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘but I want to see the two of you play.’
An hour later, Leona looked at her watch and said that if we wanted to get cheap tickets, we ought to go. While Leona slipped her boots on, James grabbed my arm.
‘What is she doing with you?’
‘I don’t know… Just met her.’
‘But you’re taking care of her, right?’
‘Yeah, of course.’
He let go of my arm. Looking at the field of cushions on the floor, he whispered:
‘You’re one lucky bloke.’
***
We came home late, still tipsy from the three bottles of wine we’d shared around the show. In bed, we fumbled and then we slept. After an initial slump, my mind flared around the paste lining my mouth. I woke up. It was five in the morning, and the sun was announcing its presence by the far edge. I drank some water and I lay down again. Just as sleep nudged aside to let me in, the person next to me turned and snorted, and the darkness of sleep lightened, and I was thrust into a new lucid dream, a new vivid memory.
There is Eric and there is Jeffrey coming from opposite lawns and meeting under the outdoor archway, where I stand with my opened bag perched on my knee, looking for my physics notebook. Jeffrey, taller than he’s ever been, taller in his long limbs and his stretched face than Eric, who himself stands like one of the archway’s thin columns, skimming the floor, rooted to the ceiling. Jeffrey extends his long arm and his thin hand for his newest handshake: clasp, two-finger pullback, knuckle graze. And he notices Eric, turns towards him, and offers him his hand like he’s offered it to me. I can count the hairs on the back of their palms. Eric takes it and squeezes the clasp, misses the pullback, punches the graze. When Jeffrey leaves us for the lure of Tom’s latest joke, Eric follows him with all of the chill in his eyes.
‘Why does he bother pretending?’ Eric says.
‘He likes you, he’s like that.’
‘That’s even worse.’
And I look at Jeffrey’s back the same way Eric does: with the sort of hate that burns through raw flesh.
I heard another nasal grunt, and I held my eyes open until the freshness in the air had stung me to tears. From Leona’s blurry shape came an uneven snore, chipping away at my calm with every snort. A girl who snored. Irritated by my lack of sleep, I made a list of all the things I didn’t like about her.
One. That she’d asked me whether I snored before we’d spent our first night together, but that she’d neglected to tell me it happened to greater mortals.
Two. The way she looked at me sometimes, as if there were a zip starting just above my solar plexus that stretched all the way to my balls, and she was the only one who knew about it.
She squirmed under the sheets, and I stopped my list for a second to watch her. An arm first, she turned onto her side, a new snort followed by a precarious silence.
Three. The time I took her on my morning walk, and we came across the lady with the black hat in Holywell Cemetery. She was, as she’d been every morning of my walk, standing with her hat in hand, her head bent over a grave that stood two yards behind Kenneth Grahame’s. Everything she wore was black, from her shoes to her turtleneck. Black long sleeves and black tights covered every inch of wrinkled skin but that of her hands and face. That skin was spotty but smooth, glossy around her eyes. At five past ten, as she always did without ever looking at her watch, she put her hat back on her head and left the cemetery through the church gate.
Leona scampered towards the grave, squinted and then nodded thoughtfully. She came back to me and told me the most recent name was from 1985.
‘And she’s here every day?’ she asked.
‘All of last week.’
‘Do you know where she goes after here?’
I shook my head, and she grabbed my hand. It was her who started it. I was reticent at first, but she seemed so interested that I fell into her game. We found the woman turning into Jowett Walk. For her frail frame, she walked at a good pace. As fast as a loving couple. Her back only a fraction less bent than it had been over the grave, she went past the King’s Arms, crossed to the Bodleian side, and stopped at the café in front of Balliol. Leona pulled me inside behind the old lady, who’d taken her hat into her hands.
‘English Breakfast, buttered toast?’ the waiter asked her.
‘Thank you, Sam,’ she said in a voice half her age.
‘I’ll bring it out.’
‘Thank you, Sam.’
She turned her back to the counter, and walking right past us without seeming to see us, she went to the café’s terrace. While Leona ordered us a pot of green tea, and eyed the café’s scones, I observed the old woman: she pulled out an aluminium chair and settled down. Seated, there was something haughty about the way she scanned over her fellow customers. When she finished her inspection, she pursed her lips, reached inside her bag and pulled out a notebook. Leona and I peered at it once we were closer, on a table of our own, a few yards away from the old lady’s. Its burgundy leather had cracks splitting it front and back. Even though there was no chance the lady with the black hat would have heard us, Leona leaned close to whisper. 1985, she said. It was possible.
The old lady’s face remained very still, her eyes brittle as she focused
on the notebook. She took a finger to her mouth, licked it, and lowered it to a page. After ten minutes, Leona suddenly squirmed in her chair.
‘Where do you normally go after the cemetery?’ she said.
‘The Parks, but wait…’
I held a hand up, still watching the old woman.
‘Let’s go now. There’s rain coming,’ she said.
‘Wait.’
The old lady sipped her tea one last time, stood up slowly, the chair catching on the terrace’s asphalt. Her white hands brushed crumbs off her black dress. She grabbed her bag and left. We watched her, between mouthfuls of scone, cream and jam, until she came to the bus stop outside Sainsbury’s.
‘She forgot her notebook,’ Leona said.
It was spread open on the table, and I couldn’t see the old lady anymore. I stood up.
‘Don’t!’
Leona tried to pull me down by my shirt. She asked me to sit down, to leave the notebook alone, but I pushed her hand aside. It was her idea, I told her and I went to look it over. A dull and dirty white page flickered with the breeze. There was nothing written on it, nothing written anywhere in the notebook. But in between two pages, there was a lump. It was a bright magazine: a beautiful blonde with two necklaces and a black frock, her face too airbrushed to be real; and headlines about the rich and famous, about a new sex position. I held it up to Leona, challenging her with it, and then I went to give the notebook and its content to the waiter.
‘What did you have to do that for?’ she asked me, but I could have asked her the same.
By the time we reached the Parks, we were talking about something else, but I felt it for the rest of the day. And I remembered it as I made my list: you can’t start something like that and not finish it.
She stirred, and she was lying on her back again, her breathing thickening and catching halfway up her throat. More fodder for my list.
Four. Her Russian philosopher and the time she spent talking about him. There was something wrong with it but I couldn’t quite work out what that was.
Like on the bus ride from my brother’s place to Leicester Square, when images from the day mingled with thoughts from the past. She was looking out of the window. I grabbed her hand, put it on my thigh, and covered her cold fingertips with my palm. Breaking out of her reverie, she smiled at me.