Is This the Way You Said?

by Adam Thorpe

  Duncan was tapping the roof of the car, ready to express his reservations, when Nolan had shot away, almost taking his partner’s toes with him. Duncan was left with his hand in the air, like a prime-time jerk. He needed to get back to the house.

  He walked unsteadily down the rough track that was the shortcut that was in the olden days the main street of Sutton Dewey. A survey for the millennium had counted forty-two houses and a pub in Sutton Dewey, not counting the new estate. Sutton Dewey went back to the Domesday Book. It was so tiny no one had noticed it going on and on. He might well die in Sutton Dewey. The security light in the newish house to his right was activated by his passing and bathed him in a blaze of white. It was precisely as if someone had noted him and was now watching what he’d do. That was the mistaken impression it was supposed to give. The Singing Kettle. What kind of a fuckwit name was that, carved into varnished wood? The Old Forge was an excellent name, wrought in iron, solid and simple. But the house wasn’t them at all. Even the sloping floors were getting to him. Let alone the low beams. They had paid too much, stretched themselves, for something that wasn’t them. The whole place had needed rewiring and damp-proofing and when they’d removed the ivy, the chimney came with it. He felt less and less interesting each day that passed. Or maybe that was age. Or not being Irish.

  He walked on in the new white world of the light, trying to look unsuspicious and steady. He hadn’t installed that light. The owner – an accountant with Shell, whose name was currently escaping him – had bought it elsewhere and installed it himself on a ladder. Duncan remembered him on the ladder in his golfing hat, looking like Mr Professional. ‘All you have to do is use your loaf,’ he’d shouted down, when Duncan had expressed his doubt that something so delicate could be done by an amateur. Duncan now stumbled and almost fell forward onto his face, into the black of his own shadow. The trouble with security lights is that they cast this very black shadow in which bottomless pits might lurk. The light clicked off and his eyes adjusted. He relieved himself into the tangle of the bank, hoping no one would come and then not caring a toss, the piss hissing into the dark tangle of weeds. He was sure his piss didn’t shoot out as fast as it did. He could’ve knocked a tin can off a post with the pressure of it, a few years back. Plan X on the hospice struck him as a step too far. A small step for a man, a huge step for mankind. Where was the moon, these days, anyway?

  The kids would scream. It wasn’t fair on them. They were on their last little legs.

  He rounded the corner between the hedges, passing a couple of bungalows tucked into the long back garden of Jackie Coops’s nice little number. His shoes couldn’t get a grip on the track. The rough stones kept budging and there were deep ruts. Jackie Coops’s security light was not coming on; Surelock Security Systems had installed it. They’d also installed the alarm system and the smoke detectors because the place was the National Gallery of Sutton Dewey: three family Gainsboroughs and a Reynolds, but keep it secret. It was very dark, he couldn’t see why there weren’t more streetlamps down here. There were loads of them down by the new prestige estate, where the lane went up to and out of the swanky iron gate. He stopped by Jackie Coops’s little wooden thumb-latch version and waved his arm over it, trying to get the security light to activate itself. Something was wrong: it was supposed to activate itself in the environs of the gate.

  He opened the gate and stepped in. The modest period manor – olde brick and tile, long sash windows, shiny ivy – didn’t budge the other side of the white gravel. He walked slowly towards it, his feet scrunching on the gravel in spite of his best efforts to tiptoe. He thought of Susan lying in bed, waiting for him in vain these long hours, and felt free and wicked and peculiar. The security light was not coming on; there was a fault. Or she hadn’t armed the system tonight. They’d put in a two-in-one sensor to cover motion and acoustic glass break for the Coops house, he was sure of that. Nothing. The alarm was, if he remembered rightly, a Brinks ninety-decibel, connected to the copshop at Netherford. Pierced you right through. Turned your brain to walnut whip in approximately five minutes of exposure. He’d better not touch the windows, either.

  That was a mean sales pitch, that one.

  ‘Cat burglars, Jackie, can cut a round hole in glass without a sound. And no flexing of air pressure, either. But the window vibrates, especially these old sash numbers.’

  ‘Does it now?’

  ‘And vibrations activate the alarm through this little contact, Jackie.’

  ‘I know all about vibrations, Duncan. I’m feeling them right now, looking at you.’

  ‘That may have something to do with your hand being down my trousers, Jackie. Pulping my chestnuts.’

  He stood under the front porch and grinned, wishing the sales pitch had gone like that. Instead, it was all very well behaved and above board. He was too moral, that was the trouble.

  He stared at the door, rocking slightly as the brandy took him from behind. Jackie Coops was a widow. You never knew with widows. The door had an entrance function, he remembered. Never locked on the inside.

  He ought really to warn Jackie Coops, sleeping unawares in her big house in her big feather bed in her silken negligée. Still a great figure on her. Gagging for it, probably. A hand, which turned out to be his, made to lift the big brass knocker, his heart thumping in both ears.

  Then the light came on and he was shielding his face. The next thing you know, it’ll be all ninety decibels of brain-melting alarm.

  He trotted back over the drive, like a man in stripes escaping a prison camp, with several shadows spiralling in front of him. The gravel more than scrunched – it screamed, it howled, he was a berk. Either the light was on a delayed timer or it was faulty. Or maybe the infra-red beam had been repositioned by a squirrel or by the wind. Either way, it worked.

  He only slowed down halfway up the main track, feeling how thickset he was. Maybe Jackie Coops, in her skimpy negligée, had leant out of the bedroom window and spotted him. She might have been in the shower. Things happen after a Badedas bath. As a kid, he used to stare at that advert and imagine being the bloke visible through the window beyond the towel-wrapped bird – the cool dude down below in his E-type on the sweeping drive somewhere in the countryside. I want to be him when I grow up, he’d thought.

  He was somewhat out of breath. Very much out of condition. In Jackie Coops’s sitting room, he remembered, was a glass table with Victorian playing cards under the glass, showing a straight flush.

  Just as well the light had come on. He would not have been responsible for his actions. He would have placed his hands on her melons and left them there for days.

  Nolan’s up on the verge this time. You can’t do it to a kid’s hospice.

  He half expected his house to have a blue light flashing over it, like in a film, but it was dark. His house was bloody beautiful. Nolan called it ‘The Fab Four’, because the thatch on the four dormers was like a Beatles haircut, but Nolan was jealous. You can’t imitate an antique house. Duncan walked towards the knotty front door, expecting the outdoor light to beam him up as usual, but there was nothing. The GX-35 Combo Sensor here and at Jackie Coops’s was meant to detect any movement of objects with a temperature close to that of the human body, so either he was dreaming he was moving or his body temperature had plummeted. Or he wasn’t an object.

  He stood inside his house, in the darkness of the sitting room, not putting on the lights, wondering why the place no longer ever smelt of beams and woodsmoke, of genuinely old things. Susan liked her air freshener. She must have gone to bed, was probably as fast asleep as the kids. She’d not armed the system, foolishly, so he wasn’t dead, he wasn’t a ghost. She would be narked with him for not getting back sooner, come the morning. He was almost swaying, more from tiredness than drink. The motion sensors up in the corners of the low-beamed sitting-room ceiling were detecting him, their red lights coming on every time he moved. He was definitely alive.

  He stood very still, seeing how slowly
he could move his arm before the sensors’ little red lights came on. It was hard, because he was pissed. It was a challenge. If a cat burglar moved slowly and steadily enough, frame by frame as it were, he could get away with it. It would take about twenty minutes to cross the room, in very slow motion, but he could do it. He couldn’t keep his balance on one foot without swaying, so he slid over the carpet step by step. The speed of a minute hand. It was a laugh. Like crossing over very thin ice.

  He was doing very well now, heading for the corner near the old stone stairs up to the TV room. So far, so good: undetected. No sudden movements. No cracks in the ice. He was trying not to giggle, sliding his feet inch by inch over the carpet. Or shiver, because the air was very cold. He’d never known it quite so cold, in fact.

  Then, quite unfairly, the lights started flashing on the motion sensors. He was not moving, but the motion sensors were flashing, on for a while then off, irregularly. The hair was standing up on the back of his neck, the only bit of him stirring. He didn’t turn round, he stayed extremely still, his hands by his sides. The red lights in the motion sensors were coming on and going off, exactly as if someone was walking about in the room.

  He turned round. There was no one. He turned back and froze again, the room swaying slightly. The sensors must be dicky, though they seemed very certain about it. On. Off. Pause. On.

  Swivelling only his eyeballs, he glanced towards the foot of the stairs, where the burnt girl was supposed to appear, purple and naked. Nothing, as usual.

  Anyway, he thought (with some relief), she would be undetectable. Her temperature would be nowhere near that of the human body. No way. Nowhere near.

  BRIGHT-GREEN TRAINERS

  The train groaned as if from some internal pain. Hugo adjusted himself in the seat. He saw flocks of birds rise from the marshes and out of his life as the window took one view away from another. It was, he thought, like a shuffled pack of cards. Life is like this, too; he might have been born a hundred years before he was actually born and fallen in love with Dorothea Tremlett, on whose poetry his dissertation was building itself inch by inch. She was very beautiful in the photographs and her long Edwardian dresses suited her as modern dress might not. He had absorbed the few surviving photographs and could now revive them in his head one by one. He closed his eyes and pictured her. She was in front of shrubs and a low brick wall and he tried to make her lovely profile move round to face him, but her eyes were bloodshot and she had a deathly, white-faced grin. He opened his own eyes and wiped the misted-up glass of the carriage window. He was alone in the carriage.

  Much later, when the train eventually pulled into the station at which Hugo had to alight, he woke from a deep and troubled sleep in which flocks of birds were diving one by one onto a corpse. He manhandled his baggage through the narrow carriage door and only just made it onto the platform before the guard’s whistle blew for the off and the last door banged shut.

  He found a hotel in the village and wandered about, admiring the clapboard houses and the air of brushed cleanliness. Dorothea Tremlett had stayed in Denmark for several weeks and had spent five days in Harboor. This little spit of West Jutland had an astonishing light, he decided. Dorothea had also said that it was astonishing and he wondered if he was here to confirm or deny, or discover something that she had not discovered. He stood on the long sandy beach backed by dunes and let the wind comb his hair back from his large brow, imagining her doing the same, her dress flapping out behind her and the parasol ungainly in its awkwardness.

  Would she have worn gloves? Would she have known him as she came towards him on this otherwise empty beach that stretched out either side under its enormous sky? Would she have known him for what he was? Would she have been frightened of his knowledge of her, or instantly fallen for his intimacy with her private, unpublished verses, her secret letters, her journal? He walked up and down, covering several miles before the utter emptiness and the continuous salty wind off the North Sea, whose waves were alternately grey and green as the sun scudded in and out behind white clouds, tired him and had him clamouring for a bite to eat.

  He ate herring smoked as of old in a low cottage whitewashed like the cottages of small harbour villages in Cornwall or Brittany. There were tourists speaking in German and Dutch. He wondered whether there was a lovely place on earth where, as in Dorothea’s day, not a single traveller went to in their sunglasses and gaudy clothes. He particularly disapproved of the cyclists, seeing their bright Lycra apparel as an affront to the sober air of the village, abandoned by the busy world on its sandy spit. His own clothes were sober, deliberately old-fashioned. He bought most of them in Oxfam, seeking out the sturdy stuff of fifty years ago: tweed jackets, herringbone coats, ties and cravats. He had so little money, he was a poor scholar. This was what he said to Julia, with whom he reckoned he was in love, when she got at him about his clothes. Really, though, he liked to look old-fashioned. He had a horror of the present, in some ways. The lurid shallowness, the noise. That metallic, blinding light off cars.

  He looked down at his shoes. They were dark and heavy, fit for a funeral. They had belonged to his father, were almost new when his father died. They felt even heavier here – not the thing for the beach, for Denmark’s bright casualness. But something about them reassured him. He had always needed to feel reassured.

  His hotel was an ugly redbrick building set a little outside the village in its own garden, but the guest houses in the pastel-coloured fishermen’s cottages had long been taken, he was told. He had imagined turning up and being ushered into some old withered lady’s back room with tarred floorboards and heavy pine furniture and a smoky peat fire, as if nothing had moved on since Dorothea’s time. But everything did move on, unfortunately. He so wished Julia had been able to come. And then he was glad she hadn’t. With Julia about, he would not have been able to concentrate on Dorothea.

  The hotel turned out to be bright and cheerful. He was offered beer and pork chops off the barbecue and appreciated the solar panels set into the roof, yet this did not move him and he was here to be moved. An anti-nuclear poster dominated the hall, and there were talks advertised that looked ecologically minded, with exclamation marks after the Danish titles.

  Dorothea had described the sober, sad darkness of the people, the spiritual depths of loneliness and isolation somewhere so poor that the thatched roofs were patched in places with old pots and pans hammered flat. None of the houses was thatched, Hugo noticed. The people here were well off, large cars cruised about the streets, including the inevitable 4x4s with their mastiff jaws that Hugo particularly reviled for their vulgarity and arrogance. The children were immaculately if sportily dressed, glowing with health. A large clean supermarket blasted him with its bracing air that was nevertheless different from the air off the sea on the beach; it spoke of sterile things, chilled products, the morgue of capital and profit. He felt quite depressed, wandering up and down the aisles in a search for little luxuries to keep him going at his work in the hotel room, and scarcely chuckled to himself when he saw that a certain brand of bubble gum beside the cash desk was called Zit.

  He sat at the bedside table in the room and did his best to work, his knees awkwardly set to one side. There was no proper table in the room, as if guests no longer needed a table to write their letters on. No one wrote letters any more, he realised. He was the only person he knew without the Internet, and he wrote with his grandfather’s plump, solid pen. His great-grandfather had been killed in the trenches, like Dorothea’s nephew. His great-grandfather’s mother had refused to eat, after that, because (she explained) how could she eat when her son was not eating? She had wasted away and died. All this must have affected his grandfather deeply, and so perhaps his father, too, long after. Everything leaves its bruise.

  He wondered why he was here, what good it might do either to him or to the world. His dissertation was a passport to a higher degree set like a gilded crown upon a mountaintop, from which he might climb down into the valleys
of the real world, but passports and crowns were no part of Dorothea’s life, for she abhorred all outward badges of success and spent her short life, its thin currency, on verse.

  Was it good verse?

  Hugo’s supervisor had warned him that he might grow disappointed with it after a while, striking endless shallows in a way one never did with Emily Dickinson, whose simplicity yawned to great depths in which one might fight for air and light. Dorothea Tremlett shared many characteristics with Emily Dickinson, his supervisor had intoned, save one: that of profound despair. Tremlett is too contented with her lot, he had said, lighting his cigarette and smiling. And she was not, like Emily Dickinson or Emily Brontë, an inveterate masturbator. This had made Hugo blush. He’d had no idea. It affected him like fall-out, like radiation from some toxic source.

  He walked the next day after breakfast. He had never seen land so flat, so enormous. The sea gnawed at the spit either side and he wondered if it might last another hundred years. There were bright fields of mustard or rape and sallow fields of wheat and barley. Trees hugged the farms like a fat wall but otherwise the wind struck nothing on its eastward course. There was the odd bright sail on the inland sea known as Limfjorden and the wind whipped corrugations of foam across its breadth.

  He removed his shoes and socks and paddled in the sea, watching wetsuited surfers plunge into breakers whose height was no doubt exaggerated by the general flatness. The sight of these hearty surfers, gleaming like seals, did him no good at all and he again felt a pang of despair in relation to his own work. The terrible word ‘cissy’ leapt at him from some schoolboy hoard and he sighed heavily, turning on his heel and starting to run in his bare feet, leaving his shoes and socks where they were.

  He ran and ran across the shallowest part of the sea, the part that stretches over the sand like molten glass only to retreat with dizzying speed and then to brim up again over itself, sparring with itself, swirling with clusters of bubbles and foam in some elaborate attempt at pattern and meaning. The edge of the sea, the very edge, is always white, Hugo noticed. Effort fluffs up foam. The lace of the dance is very fine. The beautiful lace that finely dances where the herring dies in its throes, the deadly roe of continuance and fate. Lines from Tremlett’s one poem concerning her stay in Denmark ran through his mind in strange time with the beat of his feet as they smacked through the glassy water.