He was just shutting the garage (the car would have to go soon, if things didn’t work themselves out) when he realised he still had the hated red ID-card holder clipped to his shirt. Hurriedly he stuffed it in his jacket pocket, not wanting Kat to see him wearing it. Alex had signed up to a temping agency as soon as he’d become attuned to the noises of the economy, and what those clanking and clunking sounds of ‘adjustment’ had meant for his chances of finding an equal job to the one he’d lost. With his temp wages and some savings, he was keeping up the pretence; they could last another couple of months as was. But the temporary work he’d been lucky to find was paid hourly, and so Alex worked late every night.
Yawning, he paused before going inside. Arriving home from work each night he still didn’t feel relaxed, for he was terrified of Kat finding out his deception. The place where he temped was somewhere Kat had worked about a year before; Alex remembered her ID-card around her neck, a red and jaunty noose. They’d taken his picture on a cheap digital camera and in any other circumstances he would have shown Kat for it was hilarious – his image had come out so pale and emaciated that he looked death-like. He’d accidentally blinked when they’d taken it and they hadn’t even bothered to take a second one. Time was money, and he’d a poorly paid data-entry job to begin...
He opened the front door and wondered if there had been a power cut, for none of the lights were on and there was an odd, bad smell – food defrosting? “Kat?” he called as he reached automatically for the light switch. To his surprise it worked, and he blinked as if coming up from underground. No power cut then. “Kat?” he called again.
The silence of the house was broken by the sound of something animal pounding towards him; suddenly Sheba was fussing round as if desperate for some attention. He reached down to pet the dog (he was fonder of Sheba than he cared to admit). He could still smell something that he didn’t like, and he walked cautiously towards the utility room at the back of the house, where they kept the dog food and Sheba had her basket. But the food and water bowls were completely empty, and in one corner...
Sheba cowered as if scared she would get punished. “It’s not your fault,” Alex said quietly, feeling vaguely foolish about talking to a pet. Had Kat not taken the dog out for a walk at all today then? He felt a mounting anger – he really didn’t need to come home from his poorly-paid, mind-numbing, soul-crushing job to this. Cooped up all day Sheba had had no choice, she’d chosen a corner in the utility room at least. “Kat!” he yelled, although he was already convinced she wasn’t in. Where the hell had she gone?
A quick tour of the house confirmed her absence. Alex cleaned up, fed the ravenous dog, then let her out into the garden to prevent any further accidents (he noticed, but ignored, the fact that something had been at the bins again). Then he sat fuming in the lounge, drinking whisky, waiting for Kat to come home and explain herself.
***
After an hour, Alex’s anger had turned to worry. It was dark outside now; where was she? He tried her mobile repeatedly, but there was no reply. He was flicking through yesterday’s newspaper to distract himself, but it was hardly comforting – rising bankruptcies, rising unemployment, rising homelessness. And his understanding of those words – bankrupt, homeless – had changed in the past months. They were no longer things that couldn’t, even in potential, threaten him; they were plausible, if still unlikely, fates. The town, Alex read, still hasn’t fully recovered from the downturns of the previous decade; many of the ex-miners still haven’t found permanent work since then... And Alex imagined terraces of houses that looked empty, but with people whitening inside, not so much hiding as hidden by the people who didn’t want to know... “Jesus, she’s supposed to be the imaginative one,” he said to Sheba. The dog was for some reason sticking so close to Alex that she was practically asleep on his feet. “Where is she?” Alex said again, seeing the dog’s ears twitch. He was no longer embarrassed at talking out loud to Sheba, for he’d been asking the same question every ten minutes.
He heard a noise outside – something at the bins again. He remembered now he had noticed the bag from the bin had been ripped, but he’d not done anything about it. Now those damn foxes were back! His anger flared up again. He stood (waking Sheba in the process) and ran to get the torch from where he had put it under the sink. He opened the back door, and the light from their house seemed completely overwhelmed by the unlit darkness outside.
His anger already dulling, Alex went out into the garden and clicked the button on the torch, but nothing happened – the batteries must be gone or corroded. He swore softly, and then jumped as Sheba barked from the back doorway, sounding excited and frightened. He carried on walking down the path – he could still hear the noise of something snuffling at the bin bags, but he couldn’t see the fox yet. He was surprised it hadn’t run from his presence, or Sheba’s barking. It must be starving.
Feeling somewhat unnerved, Alex looked back at the light from their house, the only one lit up in the sea of uninhabited, unfinished, unworked on houses. Like a wasteland, like the whole city was as dark and abandoned as this. Stupidly, he imagined seeing someone shutting his backdoor, locking him out of his warm and well-lit home. “She’s supposed to be the imaginative one,” he whispered.
The noise of the creature at the bins had stopped, but Alex hadn’t heard it flee. He imagined it frozen, poised for flight at his approach – he assumed the fox’s night-vision meant it could see him, whereas his straining eyes could only make out a smudge of even darker dark in the corner of the garden. One of the bins was overturned, he could tell. But other than that he couldn’t see much – was it misty out here, as well as dark?
“Hey, hey get out of here!” he shouted, but there was no sign of his words scaring anything off. He knew urban foxes were supposed to be unafraid of humans, but this was ridiculous. Indeed, it sounded like it had regained confidence, and had started rummaging in the garbage again.
Have you ever seen a fox around here? his mind chose that point to ask. Ever?
Then there was a horrible, guttural sound that certainly wasn’t a fox, and something white and very long came into his vision and grasped his ankle. Alex cried out; Sheba howled from the doorway. In his shock he dropped the torch, and it must have been a loose circuit for as it hit the ground it turned itself on; it bounced and rolled on the ground sending its beam this way and that, randomly illuminating the scene like some crazed nightmare. Alex was never sure whether there was one or two creatures at the bin bags, and if one escaped monkey-like over the fence or not, for his attention was focused on the one that was wearing Kat’s clothes and had paused in the act of eating raw, out of date steak-mince to look up at him. Her face was astonishingly pale, as if made up, and the bone structure was visible through her skin, like she hadn’t eaten properly for days. Her eyes seemed very small, receding into her face; but that was no doubt because she had them squinted to shut out the sudden torchlight.
“Kat?” Alex said. “Kat?”
Kat tried to reply but the words seemed to be catching in her throat, and all she could do was choke around the syllables of his name.
***
He’d gathered her in his arms, feeling how cold she was, and carried her back into the house. He’d had the irrational urge to let go of her, as if she were dirty, as if infected. As he’d carried her over the threshold (and she is in white, he’d thought, like a wedding) Sheba had bolted away, barking.
He took her straight up to bed, for she was still so pale, and still struggled to speak. “A... Alexsch...,” she managed, “are we going to be all right?” He’d nodded, soothed her (although his hands hadn’t liked to touch her), and left her to sleep.
Downstairs he poured himself the last drink from the bottle. Although his body felt tired (his eyes itched with tiredness) his mind was still too active for sleep. He noticed that while he’d been upstairs he’d got a message on his phone. It was from his temp agency – the company of the red swipe-card didn’t wa
nt him back tomorrow, they were letting all their temps go. He was too tired to feel properly angry that they’d got rid of him, and by late night text message at that. There was a (misspelt) promise at the end of the message from the agency to find him other work soon. You’re a statistic in those newspaper stories now, he thought; you’re one of them now. He sighed, and rubbed his eyes. He got up to feed Sheba, but the dog seemed to be avoiding him.
He was halfway upstairs when he remembered Kat’s long, white arms reaching out of the darkness to grab his ankle, and the fear of something catching that he had felt. So he turned around and went and slept on the sofa.
***
The next morning Alex awoke early, still attuned to the rhythms of employment. He supposed it was for the best, he could start looking for work straight away. But how much had he drank last night? It hadn’t seemed much, but as he looked in the en-suite mirror (Kat was still asleep; in the reflection behind him he could see one pale arm hanging out from the duvet) he was shocked at how pale he looked, how fuzzy his vision was. His eyes itched and felt like they wanted to shut all the time, as if blindness was better than the harsh light.
He opened his mouth to ask Kat if she was awake and how she felt, but it was like his windpipe was shrunken for all he could do was cough and choke. He turned back to his own reflection, which seemed to recede from him in a haze of impossible mist.
Schrodinger’s Box
“One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following diabolical device…” Erwin Schrodinger
He lived in her room. Her housemates didn’t like him much, so after he moved in the two of them kept apart from the others. Save for occasional sorties to the kitchen or the bathroom, they stayed in her small room, which seemed even smaller after they had crammed a double bed in. He didn’t care. He was as happy as he could be in one room, with his downbeat music and his precious books. She felt cramped and trapped – she could always hear the sound of the TV downstairs and her housemates laughing along. But what could she do? She had chosen him, not the other way around; she doubted he had ever chatted anyone up in his life. And now she thought that he must be dependent on her - she was another thing for him to cling to when his ‘moods’ came. She’d accepted his fits of depression without it troubling her. Not accepted the reality of what he felt, but accepted the fact that it made him need her. Welcomed it in fact, for if he needed her then she felt needed, and secure, and that his presence would be a constant thing in her life.
But she hated the one room that they lived in. Ugly and square, with the bed central so that it took up too much room and dominated. Posters of dead rock stars gazed at each other suicidally from the walls – these posters, and a big cardboard box of physics and philosophy books were pretty much all he had bought with him when he moved in. The room made her feel on edge and trapped. Even when she looked out the window all she could see were windows into other rooms, and a lid of grey sky, as if the box of their room was just one box inside another, larger one…
The room nearly always felt tense, because they were always arguing, or just made up from an argument, or awaiting the next one. She didn’t know why they argued, it often started when she snapped at him when he said something infuriating, something too dumb or too clever for her to understand. Some quote from one of his books. She remembered things he had told her before, that the act of observation changed what was observed; that anxiety was a way of trying to predict the future; that if a person’s atoms and a wall’s atoms aligned just right then that person could walk through the wall, because everything was just so much nothing… He didn’t read his books for his course anymore, he had long since been kicked off it. He was always reading, rather than doing things. Once –
He had read about Schrodinger’s cat, and unwisely decided to explain it to her. It was not something she even wanted to understand. She couldn’t see the point of understanding it, when some days he couldn’t even leave the house without her.
“That’s just rubbish,” she said. “The cat’s got to be either alive or dead inside that damn box, it doesn’t matter whether you open it…”
“It’s one atom decaying or not decaying that sets off the poison, or doesn’t…” He spoke in a loud, confident manner, a manner he could never summon up for everyday practical communication. “And the, the indeterminacy at the atomic level spreads and only opening the box and observing can resolve the indeterminacy… I think it’s related to what Heisenberg said about uncertainty…”
Name-dropping dead physicists did not impress her.
She was pacing up and down, tense, because she could sense an argument coming. She knew she shouldn’t take what he said seriously, that she should just say “yes dear” like a TV wife to her TV husband. But something about the things he said infuriated her so! Infuriated her sense of what was reasonable. Arguing about a hypothetical cat in a hypothetical box, and not the real problem they had - whatever that was. It was all just stupid. Yet some part of her had to continue arguing:
“But the cat. It is dead or it isn’t… It can’t be suspended in-between, just trapped, it doesn’t make sense…”
“There’s two possibilities in the function, each as likely as each other, the cat’s state is simultaneously alive and dead, until observation…” He spoke testily, which meant that he realised he didn’t really understand the argument himself. Which she knew would only make him depressed again. She suddenly felt weary and in no mood for any kind of row. The bedroom seemed to have shrunk around her, for she suddenly felt trapped, stifled.
“Why not just force the box open?” she said with forced light-heartedness, and she went to the window. She could see right into another house, into another bedroom that seemed built to an identical design as theirs. In it a topless man was moving forward, and the expression on his face could either be anger or lust, she couldn’t tell.
“Then curiosity kills the cat,” he said. He said it with a sad smile, to match her mood. It was some conciliation.
***
She thought of his mind as being like a box, and one that she had failed to open. She didn’t understand him. She was a firm believer that everything could be understood – and therefore predicted and planned for. When she thought of ‘science’ she thought of a clockwork model of the movements of the planets, not some theoretical experiment that could never be performed.
She had decided that he was clinically depressed – just a lack of serotonin in the brain, a medical condition. Pharmacology could allay it with drugs; psychology could determine its origin. But he didn’t want to know. He thought of his depression as something deep and fundamental. As if the imbalances in his brain reflected imbalances elsewhere. News of far away floods or armies always depressed him. When his ‘moods’ seized him and he couldn’t go outside, he said it wasn’t because he was scared to go out exactly, but because he felt there was no point. Because inside or outside, it was all just the same.
He would just sit and stare and she would try and break down the walls of his eyes. What was wrong with him? What was going on inside of there? But his eyes were blank and defeated her attempts. And she thought, this relationship is all wrong, how can I be sure he’ll stay with me, that he won’t turn tail like all the rest? And this uncertainty made her feel like shaking him, like a safecracker whose tools had failed, in a futile attempt to get inside him, or to force the secret from his lips.
The other people in the house moved out. It was the end of term and they didn’t want to stay. But they did. They could use more of the house now, but it made no difference, she still felt enclosed. All the walls were the same dirty beige colour, all the rooms ugly little oblongs. She could move between them but still feel trapped. He would follow her around each room and make her feel even more like killing him. There was no getting away - the bathroom was the only room with a lock.
Now they were using the whole house their belongings gradually scattered across it. One day sh
e found his diary lying in the front room. Of course she read it. It might help her to figure him out, and so help him. She opened the clasp and looked through it…
But she gained nothing by the act, for the diary was only half-legible, and made up of a private code of observations. There were many quotes from all of his mad scientists and dead rock stars. She could sense his personality in it, it was like all of his bad moods rolled into one. She could sense depression, fear, grimness. But as to why….? The idea that she had yet again failed to get inside his head irritated her.
Somehow he found out, and of course they argued. The room didn’t seem big enough to contain all the ill feeling suddenly released. She had never seen him so mad, he came out of his shell and asserted his being in a way she had never seen before. And this unnerved her, the fact that he was acting like someone else, and her head pounded at this, and felt like it was going to pull itself in two.
“How dare you read that?” he shouted. “Without my permission?”
She didn’t know how to reply. Permission? She had been trying to help him! Her thoughts turned violent and she had to refrain herself from slapping him, she was so sick of his unpredictability, of the fact that he wouldn’t let her in…
“You can’t…,” he said; but didn’t finish whatever he had been going to say. For a moment his eyes looked utterly haunted. Then he trembled and ran his hand through his hair. He seemed to shrink somewhat, he returned to what she thought of as his normal state.
After that argument she felt a smug feeling of satisfaction – if their relationship could survive that it could survive anything. She had been right about the fixity that he would provide. He still sat with his books and looked preoccupied, maybe more so, and maybe that was her fault. But, as long as he remained how she knew him, she could cope.
The Other Room Page 6