Is This the Way You Said?

by Adam Thorpe

  ‘Norwegian blue,’ said Tobias.

  ‘Nailin’ up the perch!’ cried Anthony.

  ‘Nailing up the perch?’ Tobias scoffed. ‘What are you on about? Get it right.’

  ‘I used to have it word for word,’ Anthony admitted.

  ‘That’s age,’ said Gillian. ‘Don’t I know it.’

  ‘You are not so much age, Gillian,’ said Steinn, gallantly. ‘Go friendly with yourself.’

  ‘Easy on yourself,’ Gillian corrected, tossing a pebble into the stream.

  ‘You’d better watch him,’ said Anthony, raising his eyebrows. His hat, perched too high, looked even sillier. ‘Maybe he’s one of them there hidden folk.’

  ‘I’m watching – aren’t I, Steinn?’

  ‘Yoh,’ nodded Steinn. ‘I’ll tell you many flowers.’

  ‘I don’t think our Virgil has quite got the drift,’ said Anthony.

  ‘Just as well,’ said Tobias, munching from a packet of KP nuts and raisins.

  The air was chillier around the stream; Clive hugged himself in his thick sweater and stared at the stones slicked incessantly by the water. He could not stop these people talking, that was the trouble. He could smell the office, the Tube, the deep fry of England rising from their natter: each one of them was like a comic-strip astronaut, encased in a bubble of helmet that shut them off from alien air. He looked about him, barely able to take in the treeless sweeps of green, the mountains, the amazing burn of light. Two days ago he’d watched smoking geysers drift into a cloudless sky while Gillian advised Anthony on the best way to hide grey hairs. That one afternoon and night on his own, lying by the whispering lake, its enormous stretch reminding him of some giant tarn rather than a loch – though it was a loch’s breadth – had merely seized up his giving side, his tolerance of the others’ awkwardnesses, had made him crave yet more solitude, gallons of it, at the same time as it had frightened him with images of himself sprawled on the pebbly shore, having suffered some sort of attack, having collapsed from some internal disorder. He had woken up in the night, under a haze of stars, with his heart beating all over the place, and had lain there hardly daring to breathe, wondering if he should walk about gently or stoke the fire, do something practical to take away the dread of finishing in such a desolate place, faced with his own nothingness. He had faced so many dangers in his job, but this was worse. This was internal.

  Death had chewed at him in Katmandu, swallowed a morsel and then moved on, leaving him lame. He did not want Death to take the rest. But neither did he want to retire, say, to Cornwall, shooting moody studies of abandoned tin-mines. He did not know what he wanted to do. He would like to dream the answer, he had thought, staring up at the star haze. He would like to sleep on it and wake up with the answer.

  He had nodded off, finally, and dreamt of the glacier, hearing it snap and groan and move, inches at a time but swiftly over so many years, erasing everything in its path. He had woken at dawn, shivering, with the pony silhouetted blackly against the first flush of light, apparently enormous in its quiet animal patience. He’d scrambled out of the sleeping bag, his limbs frozen, shocked by the change in appearance of the distant, towering cliff of ice, catching the first rays and flashing them back in his eyes.

  He had buckled his foot back on and walked to the edge of the lake and forgotten everything but the pebbles slicked softly by the water, over and over and over. He had not felt lonely, then.

  Sitting with the others by the stream, listening to their banter, he marvelled at the ability of the human soul to shift from level to level, ascending and descending as in some massive lift of glass – for nothing of that sense of wondrous solitude had survived even as a taste; it was already a recreated thing, like a painting or a poem, losing in the process its essential wordlessness, its lack of utterance, its fullness more like that of an empty sky still replete with light.

  ‘It’s a bit parky, isn’t it?’ said Anthony. ‘I think old Clive there’s ready to go.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ said Clive. ‘I’m just fine.’

  That evening they were in a bar in the small town on the peninsula. Although most of the locals were sunk into themselves as if their mechanisms no longer worked, the strangers revelled in the warmth and smoky comfort of its humanity, drinking too much after a long and tiring hike through clean air. Clive suddenly remembered what else had happened in his dream. He had killed Tobias (with a knife, he thought) and raped Steinn. Not Anthony, but Steinn. He told no one, embarrassed by the disgust he felt even now, thinking of Steinn flailing under him. The fact that Gillian had been clocking Steinn all day set Clive wondering, as the others chatted and giggled, if he was jealous of Steinn. No, he decided. He was not in any way keen on Gillian. They were just old mates from university, and Anthony and Tobias were Gillian’s mates from work. The construction of a new road had been delayed by angry huldufolk, Steinn was telling them. All the mechanical diggers had packed up, someone had died from a fall. The road had had to be rerouted. This led to more witty quips about folk hidden in unlikely places.

  ‘Nice to have a good laff, in’t it, Clive?’

  ‘Aye, Anthony. You have me in stitches.’

  ‘I’ll have you in trousers, if that’s alright by you.’

  Clive blushed through their laughter, but his face was already red from the wind and the sun. Clive looked across at Steinn, the guide’s upper lip shiny with beer, and smiled to himself. Anything is possible, he thought. He should simply have travelled on his own, faced his fears, got to know the pony as Stevenson got to know his donkey. The animal didn’t even have a name. The room swam pleasantly. If Angie was still around, he’d be almost happy.

  ‘The pony should have a name,’ he said, loudly, interrupting Anthony’s account of his earliest affair with a boy at his school who had subsequently been killed in a car crash.

  ‘Sorry?’

  Gillian looked cross.

  ‘The pony should not be anonymous,’ he added, stumbling over the last word, which came out as ‘anomynous’, but which he couldn’t for the life of him correct.

  Gillian smiled. ‘But it has got a name,’ she said.

  ‘Derek,’ said Tobias.

  Clive looked at him. ‘Derek?’

  The three of them – Anthony, Gillian and Tobias – exploded into laughter. Steinn had gone off to buy another round. Tobias began imitating Peter Cook, but not very well: fumbling through the I’ll tell you the worst job I ever had routine. Maybe even Steinn was in on it, although he would never have heard of Peter Cook, let alone of Derek and Clive. Dudley Moore, perhaps.

  Clive felt as if a great secret had been revealed – not the secret of the name, but the secret of his relationship with the others. He knew before they explained that they had called it Derek in his absence, that they had talked of Derek and Clive in his – their – absence; that this had been a joke, a running joke, in the eighteen hours he had been away. Explaining it to him as they were doing now was unnecessary, it was as if he had heard it all before. It humiliated him. The dark bulky figures at the other tables turned menacing, their flat faces staring glumly at the merry group as it made its noise: bobble hats perched on unruly hair, boots on the bare boards providing a sort of drumbeat to his emotional execution.

  Derek!

  ‘Quite a task because Jayne had a big bum and they were very big lobsters,’ Tobias was quoting, with his finger in the air.

  He could either laugh along with it, as he had done once when surrounded by rebels in Sierra Leone, or take umbrage and sulk. It was a calculated decision, to sulk.

  ‘Steinn,’ said Gillian, when the guide had returned with more beers, ‘what is the pony called?’

  ‘Seltjarnarnes,’ said Steinn. It sounded like sea breaking on black lava.

  ‘Yer what?’ laughed Tobias.

  ‘What does that mean?’ Gillian asked.

  ‘Where he come from,’ said Steinn. ‘A place by Reykjavik.’

  ‘How dull,’ said Anthony. ‘Once yo
u know.’

  ‘A place for the huldufolk,’ said Steinn. ‘Very big power.’

  ‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, I was born in Sutton,’ said Tobias, in an E. L. Wisty voice, leaning drunkenly forward, ‘and I have a very important announcement to make, I am dead, I have passed on to pastures new—’

  ‘Hello, Sutton,’ said Anthony. ‘And I’m Stoke Poges, and Gillian’s Melbourne, and this is . . . ?’

  He waved his hand towards Clive.

  ‘Out on the Morar moor,’ he said, into his glass.

  ‘You never are,’ said Anthony. ‘You’re not Scots. You’re about as Scots as my left foot.’

  ‘At least you’ve got a left foot,’ said Clive, before he could stop himself.

  ‘Oh look, I’m sorry, I completely forgot—’

  ‘I don’t care,’ said Clive. ‘Barnstaple, if you have to know.’

  ‘Hello, Barnstaple,’ said Anthony, genuinely sorry from the look of it.

  Clive stood and limped out after the conversation had turned. He could take a joke, he thought, pissing into the glimmering northern night. The stars were hidden behind banks of wild cloud, vaguely luminous beyond the streetlights. He could see the wink of a television over the road, could hear the canned laughter over the whistle of the gusts that came and went and that smelt of the Arctic and of seas you could walk on.

  Derek.

  The glacier had definitely moved. He would buy a proper horse and ride off wherever his fancy took him. He would stay on after they had gone back home and ride off wherever his dreams took him.

  Right now, however, his stump hurt, hurt like knives. New prosthesis: supposed to be lighter, state-of-the-art. Chafing him, blisters rubbing where the straps met the skin. But he’d adapt to it. Or it would adapt to him. Trekker! Something small and misshapen ran across in front of the houses and the television blinked and flickered, sent its grey light in spasms over the unlit room he could see between the open curtains.

  He limped gingerly over to the window and peered in. The room, with its out-of-date furniture, was empty of people. He imagined sitting inside on the fake leather sofa with his legs stretched out and his feet whole, then turning round to see a white face peeping in like a corpse come back from the dead. His breath was ghosting the window, however, so he was still alive.

  Soon after the operation, he’d taken a break with Angie in the south of France. It was very hot. They’d passed an antiques shop in Arles and seen this giant marble foot, probably classical, broken off at the ankle. And Angie had said, after they’d chuckled at it, ‘If only you talked more, Clive, it’d be easier.’ And he’d said, ‘Easier for whom?’

  ‘Everyone,’ she’d replied.

  Now he smiled. Thinking of Angie and that giant marble foot with its perfect toes. When the little girl came into the room, opened her mouth in surprise and then waved at him shyly, he waved back. She was smiling, and so was he. He pulled faces and made her laugh. The wind was whistling in the guttering above his head and so he couldn’t hear her laugh, but he could see it clearly enough.

  ABANDON

  1

  It had never once occurred to him that dying might be pleasurable. Without the solace of faith, he had anticipated the final weeks of weakening powers with some fear, just as he used to be fearful of going to bed up the long stairs as a child, shielding his night light. But when the time came and he was installed in the hospice, confined to the wheelchair, he was amazed at the way it had all turned to simplicity, as if a very elaborate machine had been swapped for a carpenter’s tool, its handle polished with use, its blade precise and functional.

  ‘Any more tea, Jack?’

  ‘No, thank you very much, Carol.’

  ‘Anything interesting in the paper?’

  ‘Oh, the usual stuff and nonsense, Carol. I don’t need to worry about it, at any rate, do I?’

  The nurse tut-tutted smilingly and moved on. He was only pretending to read the newspaper. George Brown had resigned as Foreign Secretary; the Stock Exchange had closed; Enoch Powell spoke eleven languages and read a book a day. He himself had no desire to read. He was content with two things: watching the emergence of spring through the glass doors of the lounge, and appreciating the young nurses: nurses like the lovely almond-eyed Carol or the waif-like Pooma. Youth had never seemed to him more extraordinary, as if it was a phenomenon only just discovered. Likewise the dappling of flowers on the lawn and under the great trees – crocuses, daffodils, anemones – seemed like something new and unique. Death was not winter, to him (nor to his old friend Bruno, but for other reasons – Bruno’s heaven being a ridiculous perpetual summer), since death led to nothing further. Corporeally, of course, it was a return, a feeding, which was why he had asked not to be cremated, despite his sister’s rejoinder that ashes were very good for roses, filled as they were with potassium (and good for lawns, too, if spread thinly before rain). But spiritually, or mentally, Jack considered any elaboration a fiction.

  And amazingly his fear had not yet declared itself; he was climbing the stairs to the unmeasurable darkness, yes – but the pictures on the wall, the views of the twilit road through the landing windows, the very patterns on the runner and the gleam of its brass clips, were as the contents of Aladdin’s cave. He now felt sorry for those upon whom the end came unexpectedly, as with both his brothers in the trenches. He had always envied them before, even though he had survived physically intact.

  2

  She’d read somewhere – maybe someone’s poem in the local poetry club, which she attended most Wednesday evenings, returning on the last bus – that sleep was a cage of dreams. Her dreams had bent the bars, in that case. Colours swarmed into the wrong places, as did whispers and words; actions materialised very suddenly in front of her and were as quickly swept away. There were brief terrors during the tea-breaks, as if masked monsters or psychopathic criminals were heading for the staff sanctuary in which the nurses moaned or giggled about nothing in particular, relishing their hold on life, their vivid presence (most of them were very young, as if at a certain point the job called one away into another existence). The untamed beasts of her sleeping hours were prowling where they shouldn’t be, and these were the first signs, like pawmarks she had forgotten the hunter’s word for.

  By the standards of the most senior of the visiting doctors, Richard Godley, she was the prettiest of the bunch. She knew this because he had told her. Only her hands, apparently, disappointed him, being stout and discoloured from the endless parboiling and soaping demanded by the strict standards of hygiene (there had been some sort of scandal a few years back, an article in the local newspaper, relatives threatening court action). He had flirted with her over dying patients or down the long corridor punched through to the new extension, but she had always stood firm against him, finding him repellent.

  She had started reading yet another of the romantic shilling paperbacks from the hospice library, only to find that its setting was a hospital, its heroine a nurse, and its villain so like Dr Godley that it had made her laugh.

  She found a kind of comfort in her less terrifying visions. Snatches of song and sudden wafts of perfume made her wonder whether the vast house was haunted. Constructed by an industrial baron some hundred and fifty years before, on the site of a sixteenth-century manor and in view of his mills’ chimney stacks (smoking until a few years ago), it was forever within earshot of a raging torrent that, they were told, fuelled the opening shots of the Industrial Revolution. When a visiting lecturer gave a talk on local history at the chilly church hall, she had put her hand up and asked if there were any ghosts in Talbot House. Someone behind her suggested that if a hospice did not have ghosts, nowhere did. She added, so softly that the lecturer had to bend forward to hear, that she had meant rather more ancient ghosts.

  A young man in front of her laughed and turned round and stared at her. Yes, the young man turned round in his seat and stared at her and she all but shrieked.

  It was precisely
the face that had appeared in her dream of the night before.

  She had pressed herself fully to its lips and the sensation had been lovely, surviving the touch at dawn of the starched pillow against her cheek. Even the faint roar of the torrent in the clough, the snores of Pooma (her roommate from Bombay), the smell of mothballs in the drawers and the unpleasant aroma of the kitchens two floors below had not quite extinguished the luxuriance of her dream. It had clung about her all morning, its details forgotten while the rest remained hovering about her as if a tall wardrobe existed in her brain that led, as in the children’s story, to a fabled land. Now the wardrobe door had opened at its own volition and just as abruptly slammed shut, the young man grinning at her as if wishing to fix his face on her memory for ever.

  That night, when she tried in the warmth of her bed to recall his face, she failed to. She knew it was young and reasonably handsome, with a mop of blond hair, but that was all; he had left before the close of the lecture during a garbled question from the floor, and she had followed him with her eyes until he was concealed by those seated behind her. His jacket had frayed patches on the elbows and his trousers appeared to have holes in them. She had wondered what this young man was doing in a sea of grey heads and remembered the kisses and caresses in her dream.

  Now she hugged her frayed teddy bear, Freddie, tightly to her breasts. The smell of Freddie’s furry head was comforting: milk and biscuits, the stuffed insides of old sofas, the oats she would give her father’s horses when the farm was still running up on the moor, even the sea that had delivered Freddie to her (a gull dropping him mysteriously at her bare feet one day on the beach at Scarborough, her mother clapping her hands in delight, a train puffing past under the rim of the hills) . . .

  She fell asleep while Pooma was still murmuring her prayers.

  3

  He would position himself near, but not too near, the high glass doors, thus commanding a view of both the room and the garden. Fearful of hogging this view, he had his wheelchair moved to one side, though no one else was noticeably interested in the world outdoors. There he could watch the birds busy at their work, the gardeners at theirs, the plants pursuing their own dumb and intricate ways and the trees gradually burgeoning into leaf. Most of all he appreciated the weather: generally cold and wet, its subtlest gradations were not lost on him, and the odd burst of sunshine came as a heavenly elixir, the dew-drops sparkling first thing in the morning when the room was silent and empty and the garden full of noise and activity and the dull ache of his dying was not yet risen to his eyes. The dew was spread for a king to walk upon, though he never came.