Sam went into the back room and worked his way through twelve bags of novels featuring violent, unhappy men who loved their country so much that they were willing to kill other violent, unhappy men who wanted to harm that country. Though every donation told him something about the people who gave the books, in that particular case all he learnt was that their owners a) enjoyed the idea of global catastrophes being narrowly averted and b) had no respect for books. The spines were broken, the covers loose, the pages water damaged. By bringing them in, the donors had wasted his time and their own. The books would raise no money; no child would be saved. But at least when he went back into the shop, Sinead had gone away.
When she came back that afternoon, it wasn’t a surprise. Having read her diary, he guessed that in her mind this was just another phase of their courtship.
Sam decided he wasn’t going to be angry. A giddy sense of dislocation was starting to build. Now that he was leaving, nothing really mattered. Perhaps his parents had felt the same way before their departure. He wondered how long they had planned it. Whether it had always been an option.
Sinead was back three times the next day, on each occasion for at least forty minutes.
On July 21, she was outside the shop for the whole morning, then most of that afternoon. She wasn’t always looking in his direction. Sometimes she was looking at her phone, most likely at pictures she had taken when he was unconscious. He wanted to take the phone from her hand and smash it on the ground. He wanted to say, “Fuck you, I’m leaving.”
But these were fantasies: If he had really wanted to confront her, he wouldn’t have stayed in the bookshop for an hour after it closed. Only when he saw her walk away so quickly she was virtually running (even stalkers need the toilet) did he dare to leave.
Alasdair was exactly as Sam had left him that morning, lying on the sofa looking at the leather-bound book. It reminded Sam of the way that Alasdair had coveted the photo album. Perhaps it would be best if he sold it as well. They wouldn’t get much for it—it was just a list of things and their prices—but there was a buyer for every book.
Sam took off his shoes. “Why are you still reading that?”
“Because it’s very good. The man knows exactly what he has bought, and how much he paid for it.”
“How do you know it’s a man?”
“By the handwriting. Look.” He thrust the page at Sam.
Date
Item
Price
June 24
Bosch dishwasher
£500
June 28
De’Longhi coffeemaker
£300
July 5
Panasonic microwave
£350
“Fine,” said Sam, who had a greater objection. “I thought you were against owning lots of things.”
Alasdair tutted. “You know, you can be very obtuse. And I don’t think you’ve read this properly. Listen to this: ‘A Bosch dishwasher, £500. A De’Longhi coffeemaker, £300. A Panasonic microwave, £350.’” He looked at Sam expectantly, then continued. ‘A Bugatti Volo Toaster, £120. A Santos Classic Juicer, £220. A Rangemaster Dual Fuel Range Cooker, £1100. A Bunn coffee grinder’—”
“All right, I get it. This guy loves buying expensive things.”
“No,” shouted Alasdair, and hit the top of the chest so hard that Sam jumped. “That isn’t the point. Why is he listing these things?”
“For insurance purposes?”
“No!” shouted Alasdair. “How can you be so stupid? It’s obvious. He’s making a confession.”
“Of what?”
“That he’s bought a lot of things he doesn’t really want.”
“Perhaps that’s true. But that doesn’t make it a confession.”
Alasdair paused so long that Sam thought he’d conceded the point. When he did answer, it was in the calm, considered way my doctor tells me that eighty-nine is a stupid age to start smoking.
“Do you ever wonder why you’re so curious about other people? Why you enjoy finding things out?” He rubbed his cheek with his palm, then tilted his head to one side. “I think it’s an interesting question.”
“In what way?”
“Because I don’t see how you’re different from the people who buy those books you don’t like.”
“Which ones?” asked Sam, then laughed in a truncated way. “Most of the books we sell are rubbish.”
Alasdair smiled, but in a way that suggested indulgence of an almost parental kind. “The ones about people abused by their priests or stepfathers. What you call ‘misery lit.’”
Sam shrugged. “I don’t see the connection. Those books are bullshit masquerading as autobiography. I’m interested in people’s actual lives.”
“It’s mostly letters and gossip. Just because you do the filling in, the inventing, that doesn’t make it more true.”
“You’ve no idea,” said Sam. “You’d be amazed what I know about some people.”
“What you think you know.”
“What I actually know.”
“Fine. You know that someone’s cheating on their wife. Or that they’re a thief. But that doesn’t explain why you want to know these things.”
“I don’t have to explain myself to you.”
“No, you don’t. But maybe you have some idea.”
“Look, I think people are interesting. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“But you find some more interesting than others.”
“And?”
“And the people you’re most interested in are the unhappy ones.”
“That’s not true,” said Sam with a trace of anger, because Alasdair seemed so sure of himself. It was insulting to be thought so easy to explain.
“Isn’t it? What about Caitlin? And Toby? That old woman who always looks disappointed? And that couple poisoning themselves. All of them are miserable. Is it, uh, a coincidence”—he paused, as if to savour the word—“that these are the people you’re most interested in?”
Sam had a quick answer. “It’s not because they’re unhappy. It’s because they’re different.”
“Because she wants to be better looking and he eats too much? Because that couple are trying to escape their lives?” Alasdair shook his head. “I’d say they were very normal.”
“What do you know about normal? You used to live under a bridge, and you don’t even know your full name.”
Other than a slight compression of his lips, Alasdair did not respond.
“Your life, if you can call it that, is a mess. And yet you still feel you can tell people how they’re supposed to live. This from a man who drinks his own piss and doesn’t have any friends.”
It felt good to speak freely, and really, Alasdair had it coming. Sam had put up with a lot, more than most people would have. He didn’t see it as being cruel, more a moment of total honesty—and how could that ever be bad? It was OK to temporarily discount the many mitigating circumstances, such as the fact that Alasdair was an amnesiac who was mentally damaged and had little control over what he said.
Alasdair’s response, when it finally came, was somewhat tangential.
“Actually, you’re dying. You have cancer. Right now it’s only in your brain”—he tapped the side of his head—“but very soon it will spread.”
It was a horrible thing to say, but too crazy to take seriously. Alasdair wasn’t finished.
“Instead of trying to get better, you look for people you hope are even sicker. You don’t care about them, and you don’t want to help them. You want to look at their misery and think you’re better off.”
“Shut up,” said Sam, because this was unfair. Being crazy didn’t give Alasdair the right to say anything.
“I have a suggestion,” said Alasdair. “Why don’t you spend time at the hospital? They have people in terrible pain. I suspect you’d find them even more interesting than—”
“Get out. And don’t come back. Go back to your fucking bridge.”
&n
bsp; Alasdair did not argue. It took him barely a minute to gather his things. Sam expected him to make some absurd remark, maybe break a window, but all he did was take the front door key from his pocket and place it on the tin chest. Then he turned and left the house, closing the front door quietly.
For the next few minutes Sam stayed in the kitchen, feeling both pleased and ashamed. That these emotions contradicted each other didn’t matter. Neither seemed about to displace the other.
I feel exactly the same when I look out my bedroom window. My eyes start at the horizon, then move down to the waves, which today are a shade between blue and green. After only a few moments I feel a sadness so familiar it is almost without sting. No doubt this dilution stems from a nagging sense of foolishness: Like Trudy (or Malea), I am gazing in the wrong direction, squinting to see what could not be seen even if it were still there.
When I lower my gaze, bringing it towards shore, I am perhaps of two minds already: the foolish and the sad. But to me these are not incompatible; to be foolishly sad is still to feel a single emotion. Only when my gaze reaches land, and people, does a separate emotion begin. Then I feel my breathing slow and my thoughts calm. I look at the people lying on the sand, in couples and small groups, either having sex or watching others; although I can’t see their features from this distance, I’m certain most are happy.
It was much the same for Sam as he stood in his kitchen. He wanted to hear, but also feared, a knock on the door. He felt both relieved and guilty, which made it hard to know what he should do, just as I, when I stand at the window, don’t know whether to turn or keep watching. If the two states alternated, it would be easy to choose. Whilst sad, I could start to turn away from the window. Even if this act was interrupted by my mind switching back to the people on the shore, those few seconds of movement might generate enough momentum for me to ignore this mental reversal. Likewise, Sam, if he had taken a few steps toward the front door, to go after Alasdair to say sorry, might have been able to carry on despite his mind returning to the satisfaction of a house without urine. If only we could be of one mind. Even our unhappiness feels half-achieved.
* * *
WHEN SAM OPENED the shop the next morning, there was a note from Malea. It was on a postcard that showed Comely Bank as it had been a hundred years before.
All she had written was Thank you, which was both disappointing and entirely expected. At least it was an acknowledgement. He inspected the picture in the hope that this ordinary scene might have been chosen to convey a message. It did not seem promising. The street was without people. The only sign of life was the horse in front of the carriage. If there had been words on shops or street signs, they might have had meaning, but there were just the tenements, their mute windows, the mist blurring the roofs.
He was about to put the card down when he noticed the woman. She stood on the corner, by the carriage, as if waiting for someone. She was going on a journey, and she was not going alone.
This is the danger of pictures. Even when they contain so little, they contain too much.
The rest of the morning passed in a blissful haze of imagining. He saw himself walking with Malea hand in hand through emerald rice fields. They ate noodles at a roadside stall, and she laughed at his failure with chopsticks. He met her family, her friends, and they embraced him, because even though they spoke no English and he was a stranger, they knew he’d brought her home.
The prospect of a new life, in a new place, made everything in the present seem trivial. The large donation of German textbooks, the three boxes of theatre programmes, and the bag of maps swollen with damp were all expressions of people’s disrespect for books and the charity, but because he would not see these things again, they also possessed a minor pathos, just as a man who has had a rash for months or years may find its scarlet patterns pretty once they start to fade.
Sam’s peace of mind was unassailable. When a woman with a bristly chin spoke loudly in Spanish on her mobile phone for ten minutes all he had to do was think of sitting with Malea on a porch at dusk. When a black poodle came into the shop, trotted round the shelves, yawned, then vomited quietly, this did not upset him either. Once again, he thought of himself and Malea sitting outside together, only this time the sunset was a smear of red. He was drinking a beer so cold it made his hand burn; when Malea sighed her breath caressed his neck.
He was able to enjoy this delusion until he saw Toby. His first reaction was fear; Sinead was sure to be with him. He had been stupid to think she would be content with watching him from a distance. This was a woman who saw nothing wrong with drugging someone who had rejected her. Fine, he thought, if she is here, then so be it. Exactly what he meant by this decisive and dramatic pronouncement he did not really know. But he wanted there to be a confrontation in which he was able to throw rocks at her from the moral high ground.
Toby, however, was not with Sinead. He was with his mother. Evelyn had never been in the shop before and seemed bewildered. “Do you know where they are?” she asked, and Toby nodded. They went towards the cookery section, him in front, and there was a slowness to the way she followed, as if she were moving against a headwind. But it was only when two women had to stand aside so Toby could pass that Sam realised he had put a lot of weight back on.
“What about this one?” asked Evelyn, pulling a book from the shelf. “Have you got it already?”
Toby turned the pages, his eyes wolfing down the pictures. Then he shook his head.
“All right,” she said. “You can get one more. And can you please not do that?” she said to a woman who had just unwrapped a chocolate bar.
“What? Why not?” asked the woman, surprised.
“Because it will upset him.”
“I don’t understand,” said the woman, and took a bite. Although Toby wasn’t looking at her, he must have heard the crunch, because he dropped the book he was holding and stepped towards her. She jumped back and shouted, “Fuck!” This reaction was so extreme that several customers laughed, as did Sam, until he saw that Evelyn was crying.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and put her hand over her eyes.
Sam brought her a chair. She sat and dabbed her eyes with a tissue whilst some of the customers stared. The woman whose chocolate bar had been imperilled put her hand on Evelyn’s shoulder and said something Sam did not hear, which made Evelyn nod. As for Toby, he hovered by his mother, shifting his bulk from one foot to the other whilst emitting a whine of distress.
“I’ll be all right,” said Evelyn, then started crying again. Her shoulders shook as she wept.
Toby was almost as upset. He stroked his mother’s hair and began to make a whispering sound that lacked actual words.
“You can’t help it,” said Evelyn. “I know you tried, you really did. You were a very good boy.” She turned her head towards Sam. “He really did try.”
“I know,” he said, then hesitated, thinking she would wonder how he did. But either she wasn’t listening, or she mistook his words for a platitude.
“He was doing so well,” she said. “We were going to visit his uncle in Hong Kong. We were supposed to go next week.”
“And you’re not going?”
“He can’t even go on the bus. Yesterday he put his hand in a woman’s pocket because he’d seen her putting chocolate in there. No,” she said, and wiped her eyes. Sam expected her to continue, but she let the negative stand.
Evelyn stood up and took Toby’s hand. “Have you got your books?” she asked. He nodded, and they walked out slowly, pausing only for Evelyn to say to Sam, “You have a very nice shop.” He could smell gin on her breath.
They had been gone for five minutes before Sam realised they hadn’t paid for the books. It didn’t really matter. The charity couldn’t stop children from being hurt. Taking parents to court, putting kids into care, was merely damage limitation. It wasn’t pointless—it did reduce harm—but however many thousands the charity raised, it could not solve the problem: people.
> Sam put the chair back in the corner, then straightened some books. It occurred to him that what Sinead had done to Toby was basically child abuse. Obviously not in a literal sense—although Toby was not fit to look after himself, it was demeaning to his age and experience to label him a child—but more in the sense that he was vulnerable. Like Mortimer, Sinead had abused the trust that had been placed in her. The more Sam thought about what she’d done, how she’d used Toby like an object and by doing so destroyed all he’d achieved and crushed Evelyn’s hopes (both for Toby and herself), the harder he pushed the books into the gaps on the shelves. They made a satisfying noise, like a block of wood being hit by a hammer, a block of wood that deserved to be hit.
Imagine a huge rock travelling though the coldness of space. Imagine that this rock is thirty million miles from Earth. Further imagine that this rock is moving towards the Earth at an average speed of twenty miles per second. At that speed, it will reach the Earth in 1,500,000 seconds, which might seem a lot, but this is only twenty-five thousand minutes, a mere 416.66 hours (which is still more than the number of hours Comely Bank had left when Sam decided he had to get out of the fucking shop).
Even though our imaginary rock is large and travelling fast, it is not unstoppable. All kinds of immovable objects can bring it to a halt, not just major planetoids, but also dwarf planets, trojans, centaurs, and plutinos. Though the stopping of our rock is an exciting prospect—the silent collision, the plume of dust, the shockwaves reaching out—this is only the most dramatic way in which the rock’s heading might change. Many forces can bend or deflect it away from Earth, just as Sam could easily have been delayed from reaching the street. If our rock passed close to any sizable planetoid, it would be subject to its gravitational field, which, if strong enough, might shift the rock’s trajectory towards Saturn, Pluto, or Neptune or through our solar system without any collision at all. If Sam had first met anyone he knew, he would have had to pause for five, perhaps ten seconds; enough to prevent collision.
The Casualties Page 18