Is This the Way You Said?

by Adam Thorpe

  The nineteenth century is five minutes ago, to this house, he’d think. And Susan was usually asleep, anyway, by the time he crawled back to bed. She slept a lot, these days. Alice and Molly weren’t a valid excuse any longer: they were at school most of the day and didn’t disturb them much at night. He wondered if Susan was depressed. Depressed people slept a lot, apparently. There was a programme about it on the radio the other day. She’d get at him. Niggle. As if he was unsatisfactory.

  There were little scuffles in the dim shadows of the birch clump. He knew nothing about animals; a bit more about birds through Steve Jonson. A car leaving the other side of the hall, where there was a gravel area next to the road, passed its headlights over the garden. Trees leapt up and died back into darkness. He picked his way further into the trees, getting caught a bit on suckers and thorns. Another mob passed along the track, laughing, their torches bobbing about in front of them. He could almost imagine, skulking there in the trees, the undergrowth tickling his ankles (he hoped it wasn’t nettles), the resentment felt by the locals. He could almost feel it in his body. These people owned the nicest places, while the locals skulked on the council estate. These people had upgraded with the proceeds from a London-area sale, and were very pleased with themselves. He drew hard on his cigarette, feeling the damp soil creep up his legs, and realised just how niggling it must be for the local yokels, to hear these people nattering away like that, and laughing as if they owned the world. A little further up the track their voices got lower and more serious, as if they were laying into people, criticising, sniping behind their backs. That’s what it sounded like, anyway.

  He didn’t know why he was picking his way deeper into the clump of birch, the pale trunks catching whatever light came from the night. It had something to do with the fact that he was knackered, that he’d been with over-excited people all day, that this had followed hard on a very stiff week during which Susan had gone all tearful on him when he’d come back from a brief pint in The Granary – alone – on Thursday evening. This was probably why he was venturing now into the darkness of the trees, catching his feet on roots and undergrowth that might as well have been a bottomless lake, they were so black, when he should have been socialising in the hall, winding up the charity concert.

  ‘You never think about me,’ she’d wailed. ‘I never even think about me.’

  Just because he’d slipped out for a pint or two.

  He stood there, trying to adjust his eyes to the blackness under the trees, and thought what a bloody thin cover it really was for a sales pitch, Nolan’s charity concert. They might as well have had a banner at the back of the stage, with SURELOCK SECURITY SYSTEMS on it. Waitrose had done this for the Netherford Jazz Festival he and Susan had gone along to last year; a lot of blokes drinking beer and jabbering at the back of the tent, where the bar was, acres of empty grass covered in plastic cups and discarded fish-and-chips paper, and these poor bods playing John Coltrane in front of a huge banner saying WAITROSE WORKS FOR YOU, or some such. He’d actually laughed: it was a joke. Waitrose’d paid for the marquee, or a bit of it, and got the right to upstage John Coltrane. In fact, the Waitrose symbol was everywhere, you couldn’t move without being reminded that this was not a jazz festival but an advertising jamboree. What hurt most was that he and Nolan had made a bid for site security, and Waitrose had provided their own. Local business done in yet again by faceless giant. Duncan was glad when he’d heard through the grapevine that a fifties Selmer saxophone had been nicked and a teenage girl molested during the Big Band jam session: a few Surelock CCTV cameras about and that would not have happened.

  He was thinking about work again: blinking in near-total blindness in a nighttime wood, with his hand on a tree trunk, and he was getting stressed out about work. He couldn’t help it. This was what Susan failed to understand: if she’d only get a job, even a part-time one, it would be a lot easier. He couldn’t believe he was nearly forty. This fact rushed into his head again. His hand gripped the rough birch trunk as if it was steadying him. He’d thought that by forty he’d be rich and famous: not exactly a celebrity, but a bit more famous than he was, which was totally non-famous, unknown, a nobody. His house was quite famous, at least in the village and to local history nutters. Once, in the early days, they’d had a delegation from Reading University – a lot of weirdos in anoraks working on a project to do with the changing role of the blacksmith in the history of rural labour relations. Microhistory, someone called it. ‘Site-definite’. They picked their way over the house and scratched around a bit where the actual forge was and hoped nothing was going to be done to that room. It had been the arty woman’s studio, cobwebs everywhere on the crumbly brick and freezing in winter.

  ‘The beams are rotten,’ Duncan said. ‘It’s all got to come out and then we’re putting in central heating and a damp course. It’s going to be the sitting room.’

  ‘Are you sure they’re rotten?’ the professor had said.

  ‘Yes. A screwdriver goes straight in. Knife through butter.’

  ‘What’s keeping up the roof, then?’

  ‘The cobwebs, probably.’

  They’d actually made him feel defensive. They went on about specialists pumping the beams with silicon or something to avoid having them replaced. He’d had it costed and of course it was out of the question, but he’d felt guilty when the beams had been pulled out. He might have acquired the biggest antique in the village, but it wasn’t Windsor Castle. It certainly wasn’t. And Susan wasn’t Her Royal Highness, though she sometimes acted like it. She’d bought plum velvet curtains for the lounge, to go with the plum velvet lounge suite, and hung a small chandelier above the dining-room table.

  The trouble with the house, he thought, was that it was this overwhelming style statement, and they just weren’t up to it. It was the cider making him think this. They weren’t up to it. In fact, they were faking it. Cider was lethal, because it was sweet and you didn’t realise it rotted the cells. Sweetness was often lethal. Sugar. He almost had a carnal passion for Snickers bars. They just weren’t up to it.

  Something was rustling in the wood. He turned and crashed his way out of the trees, hurting his ankle on something sharp. Perhaps that’s why he’d gone for the cider, he reflected, bent over and rubbing his ankle near the back door. He was wheezing again, just with the effort of bending over, his belly getting in the way, compressed against his belt buckle. The back door opened and it was – God – it was Nolan, standing there like a king in a blaze of light. He had a bucket in his hands and he was looking at it and then he threw its contents over the grass, lifting his head as Duncan jumped out of the way of the shiny arc of dirty water. It hit his shoes, though. Soaked his turn-ups.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Duncan cried out. ‘You nearly missed!’

  They both had a laugh about it. Everyone else had gone home, in fact. They went into the kitchen and Nolan leafed through the labels on the keys: Men’s Toilet, Women’s Toilet, Main Door, Side Door, Outside Shed, Walk-In Cupboard, Kitchen. The keys were solid and heavy on the thick ring, the ink on the yellowing labels so faint Nolan had to hold up each one to read it in the best light.

  ‘I keep digging keys up in the garden,’ Duncan said.

  ‘It’s a joke,’ Nolan remarked. ‘This one must be the broom cupboard.’

  It didn’t have a label. Nolan picked up the big bunch of keys and rattled it at his hip.

  ‘C’mon, Jolly, visiting time’s over.’

  ‘I’m complaining to the director about that water torture,’ Duncan joked, in a whiny voice. He was a bit annoyed that Nolan hadn’t made more of a fuss over the wetting.

  ‘I am the fucking director,’ Nolan said.

  ‘Director, my feet are wet. I’ve been physically abused.’

  Nolan was locking up the broom cupboard.

  ‘I can’t help a man who can’t piss straight,’ he said.

  ‘Where were you, anyway?’ Duncan asked. He felt less tired, now everyone had gone. The
kitchen smelt of the kitchen at the back of the doctor’s where his mother had worked as a receptionist when he was a kid: Vim and dishcloths and a sweetish, woody smell. He liked it.

  ‘Driving Mrs Parkinson and her ninety-one-year-old sister home.’

  ‘That was nice of you.’

  ‘I sold them a floodlight, a timer and a couple of dead bolts.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  Nolan snorted.

  ‘You hard bastard,’ was all he said.

  Nolan threw the keys on the table and fished out from his leather bag a small flat bottle of cognac.

  ‘One for the road,’ he said. ‘And to drown our sorrows. David Wilkes has not the means to install so much as a trip wire. He’s getting a fucking dog, the clever bastard. He said it’ll double as a pet for the poor dying kids. The manager’s golden rule: avoid duplication of effort. We’ve just made a great effort for nothing, Duncan, let alone duplicated it.’

  ‘And fire? I got him white about the gills on the fire angle.’

  ‘Not white enough. Anyway, it turns out they did the once-over a few years back, before his time, and the inspectors are happy.’

  ‘He never told me that.’

  ‘He’d never noticed that the doors were a bit heavy and had bars on. People go through life with their eyes closed, Duncan.’

  They drank the cognac out of the stubby hall glasses, the others being dried and packed away in the hire people’s boxes. The hall had no stem glasses at all, as if the only beverages it knew were tea, coffee or lemonade. They kept on drinking, talking over the concert and David Wilkes and strategies and future plans and other more personal matters. It was a nice place to talk, the kitchen. That thug Keith Glover hadn’t touched it, though the Hall Committee had been discussing its renovation for years. Through the open door the main room spread behind them, empty but still throbbing a bit. There were only the safety lights on, casting a reddish glow over the spotless floor, and Duncan found it amazing that anything had happened there at all that night, even though there was a pleasant lingering smell of perfume and drink and tobacco. He’d think this about a lot of things. Perhaps nothing had happened, and he was in some other dimension. The cognac allowed his thoughts to flow into deeper areas: philosophical, he was getting. It was like that book Susan had got him. But I’m just thick, he decided. An overweight wheezing thickhead.

  ‘It’s the pressure,’ Nolan was saying. ‘It shouldn’t do it to one.’

  ‘Life slips past. You’re never quite sure—’

  ‘My uncle shot himself,’ Nolan interrupted. ‘For example. With my father’s gun.’

  ‘IRA?’ asked Duncan, without really meaning to.

  ‘With respect, you’ve no right to jump to that conclusion.’

  ‘My brain’s in neutral.’ Duncan smirked, pulling hard on his cigarette. ‘Deadhead. Deadheading the roses, Susan’s been, all week. We have so many shrubs. So much shrubbery.’

  Nolan nodded. His big face was flushed red, his pale-ginger sideburns fluffy where he’d been scratching them, his bald patch shining with sweat. Susan reckoned he was handsome, like an old film star. Charlton Heston or someone. Duncan couldn’t see this: a farmer’s face, that’s what he saw.

  ‘That was pressure,’ Nolan went on. He rubbed at a mark on the old oilcloth that covered the wooden table; it was an antique cigarette-burn, but Duncan didn’t want to tell him. ‘That was certainly it. The farm. No money. Disease. You’ve got to lengthen your vista,’ he added, looking up at Duncan suddenly, his eyes sharp.

  ‘Me? Specifically?’

  ‘Tell me about yourself, for once, my friend.’

  ‘Not now,’ Duncan said, with a little scoffing noise.

  ‘Exactly what I mean,’ said Nolan, pointing at him.

  Then he emptied his glass. He recharged it. There was something very pale about him, now, under the strip light.

  ‘Andrea,’ Nolan said. But didn’t say any more. Duncan served himself, apologetically. Then Nolan said: ‘Risk. You calculate the degree of risk, then back off or go forward. D’you know what that girl really does?’

  ‘What girl?’

  ‘The harpist. I mean the cellist. The star of the evening.’

  ‘I thought she was just that. A cellist.’

  Nolan shook his head.

  ‘A paramedic.’

  Duncan was gazing at the Vim label directly in his sight-line, next to the sink. On the wall next to the Vim was a handwritten notice, in faded red italics: Please check water urn on * and not o!! This is very important!! The drawing-pins were rusted. Everything’s important, he thought. Those drawing-pins were shiny and new, once. The person who wrote that notice is dead, most likely dead.

  Sutton Dewey is the centre of the world.

  ‘What d’you think on that, then, Duncan?’

  ‘I’d better have an accident, quick.’

  ‘She’s giving it all up, y’know, the cello and that. This was probably her final concert. To be a paramedic. Nice looking, I thought. I think I’ll have a heart attack just for her. Kiss of life.’

  ‘You know that fire over in Conholt, the pub there? I know a bloke, a fireman, he had to work around the kids trying to get out of the window, sort of stuck to the window they were, their bodies, completely calcinated or whatever the word is. Black.’

  Feral. That’s it. A feral cat.

  ‘Purple,’ said Nolan.

  ‘Had to work around them, not touch them. Like Pompeii. Those three kids in Conholt.’

  ‘Purple. They call them purples, firemen do. Code for a stiff. Over the walkie-talkie and whatnot.’

  Duncan thought about this. Purples. A purple at Number 13, over. It gave him some nasty images. That’s why the ghost at his place was said to be purple. He’d thought it was all imagination.

  ‘I think it’s fucking heroic,’ said Nolan. ‘To give up music for that.’

  We’ve got three purples at the Old Forge, Sutton Dewey. Two kids and a female. Over.

  ‘Handling stiffs,’ said Duncan, wonderingly. ‘All cold and horrible.’

  ‘My stiff’s not cold and horrible,’ said Nolan, tapping the table. But both knew it wasn’t very funny.

  They talked a bit about the music, the Beethoven and the Schubert. Like pretentious gits on the radio. Duncan mentioned the andante and Nolan agreed as if he hadn’t spotted that Duncan didn’t have a clue what an andante was. Everything could just go, everything one had built up and loved to pieces during one’s whole lifetime. Train crash, for instance. Some git in his Mazda on the level crossing. What could you do about that? Put a security system in, that’s what. Perhaps Nolan should organise a train crash next.

  ‘She was very attractive, anyway,’ said Duncan. He saw a small, tight, bare arse all of a sudden, knew that Susan would be asleep, wished he could have the cello girl for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Wished he could be her victim. She’d be smashing in paramedic’s uniform, without a pair of knickers underneath. ‘Nice fingers. Very slender.’

  The hall seemed to be theirs for ever. The keys lay fanned out on the table, waiting for orders: they could have been Roman, they were so big and old. I could have taken her on this table, Duncan thought. Engineered it somehow. A bit of gallantry never comes amiss.

  ‘We don’t know anything about anyone,’ Nolan said, wiping his hand across his mouth. ‘Come to that.’

  Duncan refused a lift – partly because he knew, even in his own woozy state, that Nolan was not really up to driving. Not that he expected Nolan to crash in the few hundred yards to the house, with Nolan’s own home being only half a mile further on, but a little voice told him to walk. He took heed of little voices, now and again: sometimes they were pretend voices, telling him to fly away home, your house is all burnt, your children are gone – but he only knew they were fake after he’d rushed back and found the house and family intact. They’d had difficulties locking the main door of the hall – Nolan was supposed to have repaired it, but the winter’s damp had swolle
n the wood again and the dead bolt wouldn’t go home at the top and they were reasonably pissed. All the heaters had been stolen a couple of years back, and the bolt really had to go home. That would be a great advertisement for Surelock Security Systems, Nolan kept saying, if the director couldn’t even bloody well lock up the Community Hall properly and there was a break-in. It made Duncan want to laugh. Then they both started laughing, wiggling the handle for all they were worth, pressing themselves against the door. The cool, damp night all around them. The dim trees with their peeling trunks. The cognac was slipping deeper into Duncan’s head, taking him by stealth. His hand brushed Nolan’s knuckles and they were cold, but his own hands were burning. Duncan studied the poster on the door, finding great import in the fact that it was over, the concert, that the event printed in front of his eyes, with its precise time – 8pm,23rd October, 2002 – was over, finito, kaput. All things must pass, he thought. Look at that. Won’t you look at that. That’s time passing, that is.

  Nolan ripped the poster off the door and booted it away.

  They gave up on the drawing-pins. Who the hell can ever get drawing-pins out of solid wood with their nails, even sober? You need a bloody chisel, Nolan laughed. The car dug gouges out of the verge before it shot away. He may well kill himself, in fact, Duncan thought – but in a resigned, non-worried way.

  At the window of the car Nolan had said, his face lit up by the dash lights, all electronic, computerised gizmos: ‘Plan X, methinks, pardner.’

  ‘What? On the hospice?’

  ‘I’ll have a word with Sheena in the morning. Think of it as a casualty that requires urgent treatment. A paramedic, Duncan, not a fucking cellist.’