Black Chalk

by Albert Alla

  I grabbed hold of the kitchen counter. I was losing control of the conversation.

  ‘Mum thinks I’m sick too. But I’m not, alright!’

  ‘You’re not sick. You just needed time,’ I said and winced. I couldn’t take her side when she’d planned my death. I clenched my fist. I needed certainty, and I needed it now. ‘Listen, I just saw you had some herbs in the fridge…’ I trailed off, hoping she’d confess. A word, a sob, she didn’t have to say it outright. But all I could make out was her breath, sounding heavier than usual. ‘Thyme, coriander and dill,’ I pushed on. ‘What am I meant to do with them?’

  ‘They bother you?’ she barked, the line crackled, and I had my sign. Immediately, I felt my fears confirmed and a need to calm her down.

  ‘No—’ I started. But why should I calm her when I was a finger away from yelling myself? The answer came vividly: she’d cried in my arms while the rain beat relentlessly on the windows, while a turbid smog travelled from my lips to her ears, while every puff had made my lungs and mind swell, and had withered her limbs into her gut.

  And with that image, my anger choked on its stillborn carcass. I was guilty and she had a right to be angry. I’d been selfish to unburden myself on her. Now that she was suffering, I had to pay for what I’d done, for the pain I’d caused her.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘they’ll stay fresher if I put them in the bottom drawer. Are they for Friday?’

  She stayed quiet.

  ‘For the soup?’ I said.

  ‘No, for after,’ she whispered.

  ‘The risotto?’

  ‘No,’ she said, her voice seeming as distant as mine, as if a part of us had moved to a different plane, and every word was just another wink to answers we already knew. ‘It’s for the surprise.’

  I smiled against the receiver.

  ‘On the river?’

  ‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘It’s a surprise.’

  ‘Go back to sleep,’ I said and I hung up.

  The medicine bottles stared at me serenely. They were hovering on the white counter like two buoys in a harbour, the green gate freshly painted, the red marker faded to pink with the sun, and I felt myself rush between them, down a sea of white towards a weeping willow. I grabbed the green bottle and studied its Spanish writing – México, D. F. written along the bottom ring. There was a plastic seal along the top ring. If I broke it, I could try a pill and see how I felt, and then I could try two, and then three, until my body became immune. There I’d be under Donnington Bridge, pretending to float dead, but really laughing at the stars.

  But if I broke the seals, she would notice. We would have to sit down, look each other in the eye, and talk about it. My hands went damp – I forced myself to consider it: she was blowing cold air on her cup of tea, while mine cooled down on the coffee table. (I had to do something about that vinegar stain.) I looked for the right words, stuttering, humming and hamming, struggling to bring it to the surface, where it would only harden into a shell, when we both knew, when we both knew we knew. No, silence was a better option – that way at least, we could pretend that everything was fine. I placed the two bottles back where I’d found them, in the 1920s French cake tin Leona had bought at La Rochelle – the metal one in shades of brown with the picture of a little girl holding a doll.

  I held on to that resigned decisiveness while I took a shower. When I turned the tap off, I realised I’d left the door open and steamed up the whole flat. I’d be dead in a week; a little moisture on the walls didn’t matter. But I was still annoyed. My mind was pacing, racing, and my eyes followed, jumping all over the room, fastening on every vivid detail. The full-length mirror on the bathroom wall cleared with a fresh draught, and I could see myself. There was a furrow across my brow. My mind latched on. Such a unique expression: four half-moons spreading from the corner of my eyes, with a single white unbroken line spanning from one temple to the other – no one else’s brow creased in just that pattern. The beauty of the expression, so true to everything I was, moved me. And soon my forehead would be as smooth as a sheet of wax. I’d spent three years at the Chamonix gym working on my triceps until I could see them sharpening the back of my arms, and there they were, poking through freckles and moles, bulging when I flexed them. In a week, they’d be bark starting their slow wither. Not even a week: five days. Five short days, and September would be almost over, and Leona would be getting ready for her second year of university.

  It wasn’t possible. The world couldn’t go on without me, that bee buzzing over my face included. If I weren’t there to see them fly, bees wouldn’t bother. They’d die with me gracefully, like a pharaoh’s retinue, shutting their eyes when I shut mine.

  I needed to move. Naked, I ran down the stairs, skipped the little gate into the garden, and lay on the grass. The grass would die because it only existed for me, just like that wall and the people looking at me behind the curtains of that window. I laughed. They didn’t know it, but they were about to die. Enjoy the view while you can. Those triceps, the rebellious tuft of hair on my chest, and my cock, enjoy them. That cock, which had led me like a ship’s rudder, that cock which had hosed piss over Europe’s highest mountains, into the Pacific’s warmest currents, that cock which had shot sperm on a redhead’s thigh and smeared it down to her knee, as if it were my brush and her thigh my canvas – Fuck! – that cock would remain forever placid, and shrink until it was as long as the tip of my little finger. The man behind the curtains showed his face and knocked loudly on the window, but I didn’t care about him. I wanted to hit a fast bowler back over his head, and to stay in that moment when only I knew the ball was going for six. I wanted to put on a pair of 188s, climb over a ridge, and plunge over unbroken snow. The ground to slip rugged under my skis, a tree rushing to embrace me, and with my strongest push, to graze past it, laugh, and charge a bigger trunk.

  I jumped up, standing tall with my arms on my hips and my chest ready to flatten anyone who dared challenge me, and I stared down everything around me. That measly tree, nothing more than a bush stretching a foot higher than it should; that concrete slab, dark with cancerous cracks, crumbling with next year’s rains; and the paint peeling off the gate, three blue leaves hanging from another blister.

  Fuck them all.

  I would never meet another girl. A blonde with cropped hair, a ring in her nose, who could tickle me wild with the stud in her tongue. A scowling brunette, who’d hold out a soft hand just when I thought I’d screwed it up. I wouldn’t hear a new voice quietening to a whisper and pulling me in as surely as if there were a cord fastened to my heart. Stealing glances, delighting in the impossible, and yearning for flesh, flesh and more flesh (round, smooth and firm), I wanted it all and I could have none.

  My shoulders slumped and I sat back down, folding my legs so the neighbours wouldn’t see my shrinking cock. There might be more muscles hiding my body, more hair covering my arse, but I was still the boy who’d feasted on Eric’s madness and backtracked come payday. The same killer who’d spurted bullets at Leona. I could fight it all night but the facts were there: one, I was guilty, two, I deserved to die. It was time for the blindfold.

  I surrendered. My mind was the centre of a storm, and images, ideas, memories all flapped with the winds. Time passed. I did things, time did things to me – I can’t remember. And the bike was fixed, I was dressed, I was cycling in the middle of the road, and I was avoided by cars, taxis, and buses full of men in football shirts and tracksuits. By a grandmother who kept on sounding her horn, wanting to claim the centre of the road back for her kind, who pulled up next to me when she finally overtook me, asked me whether I was crazy, and who drove off when I gave her the finger.

  The September sun had finally vanquished all of the summer’s clouds. I squinted to see through the asphalt’s glare, and recognised a ditch on the side of the road. There used to be flowers pinned to a telephone pole by this ditch – because an eighteen-year-old boy had killed himself driving too fast, my mother had told me
– but the telephone pole was gone, and with it the flowers. And there, it felt closer in a car, was a turn I’d taken thousands of times, with a harvested field waving yellows and greens.

  I stopped by a new sign: ‘Hornsbury Sutton School’.

  They’d changed the name. It made sense, I nodded to myself. I hadn’t planned on going to my old school – I wasn’t capable of planning anything – but I’d ridden on the windy road escaping Headington Hill, and now, there it was – it’d changed its name but I’d found it anyway. I turned my bike into the lane leading up to the school. The road had been freshly relaid; new white lines shone on its sides. My wheels glided silently over the dark bitumen. I heard nothing but the tyres’ gentle hum and the deaf sound of the wind pressing on my ears, until I reached the crest where the side hedge turned into a woven-wire fence and my old red bricks rose from the hillside. Just before the bus circle stood a discreet sign: ‘Hornsbury Memorial’ and an arrow pointing down a path once only used for June Jamborees.

  I put my bike on my old rack, the closest one to the stairs – since it was half-hidden by a hedge, there was always a free spot – and I stood at the bottom of the main steps, longing for a pair of heavy doors I could blast open. Hornsbury School’s master was returning home, I laughed at the renovated façade. They’d removed the black crust that used to pile on the bottom of each brick, so that the white bricks interlaced in between the red bricks finally showed their pattern. Getting it pretty for my return; that was even funnier. I felt like a madman thrown into his dream world. If only I had two guns on my hips, I could kick the doors open and swagger my way home.

  Instead, I walked up the steps and two automatic panes silently slid open. A woman with a ponytail glared at me. It was 2.30 p.m. If I remembered the timetable right, students would finish their current period in five minutes. I walked down the lino-lined corridors and came out exactly the same door Jeffrey and I used to take to go down to our physics class on Thursday mornings. The neo-gothic archway still left the building to finish abruptly halfway down the hill. I followed it until there was a gap between the trees and I saw the glass spire Leona had talked about. It spanned twenty yards above the ground, and at its end, it opened into a glass flower, as if its nectar could attract dead souls back to Earth.

  I turned around. Students in their green blazers, the boys’ ties tighter than I used to wear mine, girls still pushing the rules a button at a time, swarmed out of the main building’s back doors. Yes, with two guns, I could spray bullets until thirty were down, march to the memorial, pray, and die a fitting death. A group of sixth-formers strolled down the archway, looking at me funnily. I’d show them. Perhaps it was because I wasn’t wearing a uniform, I thought, and for the first time, I took a second to notice what I’d put on. Brown sandals, paint-stained jeans, a business shirt opened to my breastbone, plus a five-day beard. I would have stared too. If I lingered any longer, a teacher would come and ask me to leave the premises. Impulsively, I made my way towards the spire: as I came closer, I saw its fat round base, also made of glass. All together, it looked like a pimple shooting pus at the sky. It was probably meant to symbolise something, perhaps hope. I skirted around the flower beds that surrounded it and went right to the centre of the sports ground.

  The football posts were already up, the white lines already painted, but a wicket the groundsman must have used in August still looked playable. I took guard at the crease and pulled a long hop, cut a throat tickler over the slips for four, backfoot drove like I’d never backfoot driven before.

  ‘Oye!’ I heard behind me. A black dog was running towards me, its nose tickling the grass. The groundsman followed in his green sleeveless jacket. His two gardening gloves in one hand, he was waving me off with his other hand.

  ‘You’re not allowed to be here. I can report you to the Dean.’ He stopped a few yards away. His dog came to smell my hand. ‘Are you a student? This is private property.’

  ‘Mr Rivers?’ I asked, smiling at the normality of the moment. He’d shouted me off his field just the same way before.

  He squinted: ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Nate. Nate Dillingham.’

  He pursed his lips and eyed me up and down.

  ‘So you are. You’ve got hair all over your face now. Hard to recognise you.’ He fidgeted with his gloves, his eyes on the grass, on his dog. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said with a wide big smile.

  He looked at me like I’d said something strange.

  ‘Are you on something? Acid, LSD?’

  ‘No.’ I couldn’t stop smiling.

  His eyes on his hands, he put his gloves on and took them off again.

  ‘What have you been doing since… since you left school?’

  I looked at the green field around me, at the grass stubble poking through the square’s mud. It was all so simple, all so real.

  ‘None of it matters,’ I said. ‘I’ve been living in a dream.’

  He nodded, his lips pursed. He didn’t understand me, he couldn’t understand me – for eight years, he’d been cutting grass, painting lines, rolling pitches, while his dog trotted around him. He’d stayed firm while I’d ran away. His life had flowed from his past, and now he could stand on his field, and he could say that he belonged. In the meantime, I’d reneged on what I’d done, what had happened to me. And I’d fled, I’d grasped at air, I’d come back a shell of a man.

  Mr Rivers put his hands on his hips.

  ‘Well, don’t stay there, you’ll mark my pitch and the grass won’t have time to grow before winter.’

  ‘Are you still playing?’ I said, bending down so I could pet his dog.

  ‘As much as the body will let me play. My knees aren’t what they were.’

  ‘You were never one to steal a quick single,’ I chuckled.

  ‘No, no, but now I have a bionic knee, and this one’s about to go.’

  His voice hadn’t changed: the same stout chat I’d heard behind the stumps when we used to play him in the OCA. In those days, everyone knew him as Johnny Cricket – the man who played four games a week, and who’d happily have played seven if it weren’t for his wife.

  ‘Do you still keep?’

  ‘If the captain’s smart, I stand at slip and that does me fine.’ He smiled and looked around his field. ‘It’s changed a bit since you left, hasn’t it? They built the memorial—’

  ‘A monstrosity.’

  ‘Well, they consulted everyone. Three years of consultations. You could have told them. And they finally built a proper pavilion.’ He pointed his thumb at a building I hadn’t noticed, a modern take on a traditional pavilion, slick concrete walls rendered to look more like wood.

  ‘Looks nice, doesn’t it?’ I said.

  He sniggered.

  ‘Typical of them, isn’t it? The space I have in there, the tractor hardly fits anymore. Always trying to save money. That hasn’t changed.’

  Nodding, I wrestled a ball from his dog’s jaw and threw it far. She ran after it.

  ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Do you mind if I stay here for a bit?’

  ‘On the square?’

  ‘No.’ I moved off the square. The dog came back with the ball. ‘Just here.’ I waved my arm at the field, at the trees.

  He studied my face, and then he nodded.

  ‘Just don’t get in the way when I’m mowing the lawn.’

  As he turned around, I snatched the tennis ball out of the dog’s jaw, and threw it the other way. She looked at the green ball travelling through the air, at her master ambling in the opposite direction, at the ball, at her master, and pounced after the ball, her thin legs heaving her big belly and its white under-fur across the grass. The ball dipped and bounced, and it dipped again, and her body flew angled across the ball’s path, until they were travelling together, and she was turning around in a slow circle. She dropped the ball, heavy with her drool, by my feet and this time she didn’t look at her master. A gentle breeze carrying the smell o
f freshly cut grass, the sun resolutely shaking off all troublesome clouds, I played with her while Mr Rivers cut the lawn. After what felt like a hundred throws, she brought the ball back and slumped to the ground, keeping the ball in her teeth. We were both tired. I sat next to her and petted her, my eyes closed, enjoying the singular beauty of the moment. Her whimpers, her uneven breath, they were all part of it. When Mr Rivers turned his tractor off, she rose replenished and ran his way. I lay still, facing the trees down the hill – the ones I used to fetch cricket balls from whenever the wicket was too close to the downhill boundary and a burly right-hander got stuck into our friendly spinners – but I didn’t think of the past. An appreciative calm had taken hold of me – my view, the smell, the temperature, they were all perfect, and it was only now, when I had hours left, that I realised it. I breathed deeply, air swelling into my gut, and I floated happy in the moment.

  At one stage, I heard two voices, getting nearer, shouting, perhaps at me. When I turned around, Mr Rivers was walking towards them. It was two young men, teachers I guessed, coming to investigate, to kick me off the school grounds. The three of them, pointing at me, spoke halfway between the memorial and my patch of grass. Then the teachers walked back towards the school, and Mr Rivers came by.

  ‘I’m going home,’ he said.

  ‘Do you mind if I stay a bit longer?’

  He took a second to answer:

  ‘As long as you don’t vandalise my pitch.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, and he called his dog to him.

  I lay on my back and watched the clouds. With them, the beauty continued. They were thickening, cooling down the air, drawing patterns in the sky. If I’d worked at it, I could have learned to draw clouds. It was all about their shadows – easy enough for the eye to discern, hard to render with a pencil, with a brush. An enormous canvas of a cloudy sky, capturing its volume, its movement, the shades of blues and whites. There couldn’t be a better picture than that. I didn’t have the time to work on it now, but it didn’t matter; a young man would stare at the sky one day, and dedicate his life to capturing that single beauty. It would be a life well spent. And it struck me as obvious: to capture beauty and give it to someone else was the only way to spend a life.