Genius Loci

by Edited by Jaym Gates

  “You know I did. Fresh croissants and lemon marmalade for now, but I guess we’ll be working hard; there’s a slab of bacon and a couple of dozen eggs for second breakfast.” And a pair of sourdough loaves that I didn’t need to mention, and what more I had scavenged from the larder to keep people going. I’d have to shop for lunch, but everyone knew that; they’d all pitch in. And for the inevitable alcohol, we wouldn’t raid Gerard’s cellar—or rather we would, but not without contributing.

  “Here comes the skip. Bang on nine, as promised. Guys, you go round the back, let yourselves in. Tell him I’m dealing with the skip guy, and he won’t even need to move his car. Jody—”

  “Straight into the kitchen, coffee and croissants, keep him sweet. I know.”

  #

  You’ll always find me in the kitchen at parties. It’s Quin’s fault, more or less. Mostly more. He taught me to cook; more, he laid it out for me that it was actually an option, that rough ragged boys could learn the skill of it, the art and the craft together. Which started with eating, learning how to eat. The first meal he ever made me, pork and mushrooms flambéed in brandy, sauced with cream, green beans in butter on the side: I had no idea it was even possible, let alone that it might be so easy. Bread and a fork and a bottle of Sancerre, I was in pig heaven. I was seventeen, what did I know? He pitched it perfectly; that was his gift. Another boy he might have charmed with music, or with books. The house was full of both. I guess any seventeen-year-old can eat, but Quin knew to push me further.

  He always did know, what boy in which direction. And there were always boys passing through for him to exercise that talent on, before me and after me, just the same. He found us, or we him: he helped us grow and let us go, and when we checked back there were already others, newly in place. In our places. It almost, almost didn’t matter.

  We were the generation that reclaimed him at the end, though. He was ours, we were his; we got to keep him. A bunch of middle-aged men, seeing one of their own through to his long home. He had fifteen years on me, no more. At seventeen, that had seemed an age. It had been an age. At forty? Not so much.

  Not all of us had come to him as boys. There were students and graduate students, one or two of us were faculty or friends from otherwhere—and of course there was Gerard, who was something else altogether. Still: we were all of an age now, regardless of when we’d met him. All within a decade of each other, with all that that implied. Which was largely possessiveness and cohesion, mixed: of course we’d kept him to ourselves, through that long last year when he wouldn’t go back into hospital. Of course we coped, of course we bonded. Some of us hadn’t been friends before this all began; some of us still weren’t, and never would be. Nevertheless. We were here and doing this, one last effort for the group, for the thing that we had been. A brotherhood of blood, we called it, but it was more than that. Brighter, sharper. A brotherhood of blades, who shed blood only incidentally.

  #

  Gerard was grumpy as ever, first thing. I fed him caffeine and carbs while I let him see how organised we were, how on top of what needed done. There was the skip in the driveway, for everything we chucked; here came the shredders, for whatever papers he didn’t need to keep; here were the boxes, to take the books and CDs that he did. Sit down and watch, and try a pain au chocolat. There’s nothing else to do.

  #

  Of course that wasn’t true, it couldn’t be. This was his house. We only called it Quin’s from courtesy and long habit and that sense of occupation that has naught to do with deeds and mortgages. Here he held court; here he brought us, fed us, revealed us to ourselves. He was gone now, but even so. More than memories remained. Those were Quin’s books that lined each room from floor to ceiling, Quin’s papers that overflowed the filing cabinets: one last heedless gift, a weight shrugged off for someone else to deal with. On paper, that was Gerard. In practice we meant it to be us, but we couldn’t actually make the core decisions. What to pitch and what to pack, what to donate, what to recycle: Gerard had at least to lay down ground rules, so that we could filter out the easy choices before we took edge cases in to him.

  Even to me, even in the kitchen, that applied. I was packing as I cooked: stripping shelves, filling boxes, leaving cupboards empty in my wake. Gerard was handy in the kitchen; of course he’d want the good knives, the seasoned wok, the Le Creuset and the Microplanes. The slow-cooker, though, we’d bought that in to make the stocks I simmered down for Quin’s constant consommé—would he want to keep that with him, or should I take it home? What about the spice rack Quin had improvised from a wardrobe shoe hanger—and what about the spices? Half of them were faded dusty ghosts, liable only to fade further. The more I dug about, the more I had to check with Gerard. And every time there was someone else ahead of me, checking whether he wanted something else, the SF paperbacks or the hand-labelled cassette tapes or an envelope of photos or a lamp.

  Gerard had settled in his own study, surrounded by his own unequivocal things. He exuded patience and tolerance and reason, and reminded me of nothing so much as a ticking bomb. Gin was safe to defuse him, but not at eleven in the morning—so I did the other thing, and removed myself from ground zero. Sooner than I’d planned to, I went out into the lane, with my mind on the shops around the corner.

  I was waylaid, though, and not for the first time in that house. Here was Mal sitting on the wall alone, with a bottle of beer and a tight singleskin the way he liked to roll them. Of course I hitched myself up beside him, of course I took a swig from the bottle and a puff from the joint. It was something we had that not even Quin had taught us. That made it something to hold on to, that wouldn’t turn slithery beneath our grasp.

  Without looking in their direction, without so much as nodding his head thataway, Mal murmured, “Have you noticed, over the road there…?”

  “Oh, yeah.” Inside the park railings, in the shadow of a great oak, two lads were watching us. Middle-aged men in their territory, passing beer and a smoke back and forth—of course they were watching.

  “Remind you of anyone?”

  “Hell, no. We were never that thin.”

  “Yeah, we were. We were exactly that thin. And that nosy.” And Quin wasn’t here now to beckon them in, and you couldn’t really call it a decision, but Mal and I were both suddenly on our feet and strolling over.

  “Hey.” They gazed at us through the railings, wary, curious, a little confused. Mal made things easier by taking out his wallet. “You lads fancy picking up some cash?”

  Of course they did. One of them was quicker to ask, “What for?”

  “A day of your time and a bit of heavy lifting, that’s all. We’re clearing out the house, and we’re all three times your age and only half as flexible. Twenty up front, we’ll feed you and beer you up and give you another twenty when we’re done. That sound okay?”

  “Each?”

  “Of course, each. And the same again tomorrow if you can come back. Just if you’re up for it, no pressure.”

  They were so up for it, the gate at the corner was too far away. One of them swarmed the railings and was holding out his hand before his mate was halfway over.

  The nice thing was, he wasn’t reaching for Mal’s cash. Not yet. He was introducing himself, and his friend: “I’m Jonah. The slow one’s Ben.”

  “Fuck you, Jonah,” came down a little breathlessly from where the other boy was perched in discomfort atop the railings. Jonah’s thin cool hand in mine and a tentative grip, playing grown-up with strangers, and then the necessary light relief behind him, “Oh, fuck it,” as Ben jumped down with his jeans snagged on a spike and we could all hear the seam tearing.

  Jonah sniggered as boys will, as no doubt he would again and again as he made a story of it, as he told it again and again. Mal was instantly practical: “Not to worry, we’ve got needle and thread in the house. And half a dozen men who can sew, if you can’t; and other jeans you can borrow in the meantime. Hell, we’ve got other
jeans you can keep, if you find a pair you like. That’s the point of this, we’re getting rid of stuff. We all used to keep a change of clothes here, and most of them are still cluttering up the spare room…”

  I let him lead them away while I just stood in the roadway there, watching; and none of that was about seeing how badly Ben had ripped the seat out of his jeans, or hoping for a lewd glimpse of his boxers. I was timetripping again, watching us follow Quin inside, twenty years ago. More. Hearing his voice again, they come out of the trees, ready for anything.

  Hoping these lads were up for it; and trailing in behind them to find out, just when I had expected to go shopping.

  #

  Bashful Ben, freshly denim’d in nearly-new black CKs that I already figured we were never getting back, found his voice at last in the front room that had been Quin’s at the end. Staring at the great hospital bed that stood so inherently out of place among the books and the albums and the faded silk brocade, he said, “What’s the story here, then?”

  True stories take a lifetime in the making, in the telling, in the fact of them. These boys would have their own, that we’d pick up in echoes and missed beats and hesitancies, the mouse-overs of conversation; they wouldn’t know yet how to listen for those in us. I brought them beers, while Mal gave them something so raw and abbreviated it was almost untrue, it said so little. “Gerard—the big man in the back study—used to share this house with his partner. But Quin was sick, and he was a long time dying, and a bunch of us nursed him here at home. The bed’s going to a charity now. That’s something you could do for us, actually; it needs taking apart and carrying outside, they’re coming to pick it up this afternoon. Come on, I’ll show you where the spanners are…”

  #

  Boys and tools and beer, noise and work and tubular steel; nothing could be more right. We left them to it. I borrowed Gordy and his car for the run to the shops, figuring that we were going to need more of everything. More than I could carry, more than we could possibly imagine, just altogether more.

  By the time we came back, Quin’s bed was a neatly stacked pile of puzzle-pieces leant against the skip, and the boys were less neatly leaning on that same convenient prop, sharing a cigarette and a quiet chat. I grinned, warned them not to smoke in the house, and enrolled them to shift the contents of Gordy’s car into the kitchen. “Beer in the fridge, wine on the counter, food on the table. Is either of you any good at building sandwiches? No, that’s what I figured. When we’re done unloading, check with Pete, but I think everything that’s left in the garage can go straight into the skip…”

  #

  People ate on the fly; I was as busy as anyone, keeping up. There were runs to charity shops, runs to the secondhand bookshop. The disassembled bed went away. Filing cabinets replaced it, lined up orderly in the driveway and supposedly for sale. Jonah thought his mum might like one; everyone knew it was hers for the asking.

  And nothing about the day was easy, but the boys did make it easier. Like oil in the workings, slippery and alien and getting everywhere. And they might have been us, they must have been us, we must have been just like that. Lean and intrusive and flexible as ferrets, brash and expectant like awkward, eager dogs. Jonah talked all the time, Ben never spoke from choice: it didn’t matter. They were still interchangeable, interchangeably me, interchangeably us.

  More and more I felt it, as the house emptied around us. Quin’s stuff went away, and I’d thought that would reveal more and more of Quin; I’d looked to see the real man exposed, in the absence of his trappings. I’d thought we’d be haunted by memories, talking all day just to keep the loss at bay, sharing old stories and old photographs and wrapping grief about us like a blanket against the brute blunt impact of bared shelves, bared floors, bared hearts.

  It didn’t happen. Something was happening, though, something else. The boys were shifting furniture overhead, ripping up ancient carpets, lugging them out to the skip. Everything about that was loud: coarse laughter and clumping feet, heave and drag and a sudden resounding yell when the foot of a dresser came down unexpectedly on the foot of a startled adolescent.

  “The house sounds wrong,” Pete murmured, reaching for a pasty.

  “No, it doesn’t. It just hasn’t sounded this way for a while,” hollow and busy both at once. It wasn’t the nostalgia I’d expected, but I remembered this. When we built the bookshelves all through the house, room by room; or that summer we chased Quin and Gerard off to Greece and decorated everywhere, new wallpaper, fresh paint; and then ten years later when we did the same again, when they were away in China. Hell, more recently than that, when we shifted everything around to make the front room over to Quin in his entirety, all contained within that one small space. It had taken work to fit him in on that mechanical insect of a bed with his familiar organic comforts around him, his furniture and curtains, his texts, his friends.

  Now we were doing the other thing, unpicking Quin from the fabric of the house, which was the fabric of our lives. It should have been momentous. It could have been unbearable. Even Gerard was dealing, though, better than anyone might have anticipated. His glasses flashed blankly threatening from time to time, but if it never got worse than that, we’d have a better day than ever we had hoped for.

  Actually I thought we were having a bigger day than any of us imagined. I felt as though we were in the grip of something greater than ourselves, and perhaps we always had been: a narrative unfolding, weighty and irresistible, like a bolt of cloth flung across the landscape. I thought we were possessed, reclaimed, appropriated.

  It wasn’t, it couldn’t be about the house. We were leaving the house, disassembling it. Taking that whole artefact apart. We’d build again, but otherwise: different relationships in different places, not this. We’ll never be that good again—Pete had said it, and it was true, and we did all feel it.

  It wasn’t, it couldn’t be about Quin, either. I’d always thought we lived in his story, but apparently not. Someone needs to be here, to pick them up. Maybe he really meant that, as though he was as interchangeable as the rest of us, playing out a role as written, occupying a space already defined for him. He liked to claim that boys came out of the wood fully formed, newly sprung, seeking the lives they were meant to inhabit. Families and histories, school reports and medical records were just the universe giving them a hasty retcon, a necessary backstory. I used to tell him that was the ultimate in solipsism, the narcissist in him running rampant; that Mal and I had absolutely existed BQ, before he met us just up the lane there, in the shadow of the trees, his prime exemplar. He said of course we’d believe that, it was crucial to the fiction that we buy into it. You can’t doubt your own legend.

  By that logic, Jonah never had a mother until he needed one, until he said she’d like a filing cabinet. Then there was a shift in creation, a rearrangement, and there she was: just half a mile distant and they’d lived there all his life. No point trying to call her, he said, she never charged her phone. He’d just trot down there to confirm. He’d be back for supper.

  Of course he would. No boy ever missed a home-cooked curry. I called the stranded Ben into the kitchen, to save him having to talk with any of the others or, horror of horrors, Gerard himself. We had the big man mellowing on gin, but he’d spent all day shredding Quin’s most personal documents, which of course meant rereading half the story of his life, while the rest of us dismantled his home around him. I wouldn’t push a kid under that particular bus, no matter how mellow. This particular kid had gone in to empty the shredders a time or two; I thought that was exposure enough.

  So I kept him with me, showed him how to chop an onion, let him look over my shoulder while I mixed spices and fried chicken, simmered lentils, boiled rice. Ordinarily I don’t like anyone else in my kitchen, but the day wasn’t ordinary and the kitchen wasn’t mine, and an apprentice has his uses even where he slows you down. There’s a pleasure in passing on skills, sharing knowledge; maybe it’s even a duty
. And it might be the last time in this house. I could call it a salute, a gesture of gratitude, an old debt settled. I am not Quin—I had to keep reminding myself of that, I am not Quin—but I could learn to be. I had to keep ignoring the little voice that said so, I could learn to be. Quin had forged a thing and left it with us, left us with it. Not the house.

  We still had the bulk of the furniture, at least one more day, so we could eat around the Georgian dining-table that last time. All the linens were packed away; Ben and I set china out on bare unthinkable wood, and passed inconceivable kitchen-roll for napkins. Gerard’s expression was a masterpiece.

  He plied knife and fork judgmentally, but we’d made a mound of chapattis, Ben and I, so most of us ate with our fingers. It was an art new to the boys, and of course they made a mess of it, all over the precious walnut; but the table had suffered much this last year and was already headed for the French polishers before it went to Gerard’s new place, so even he only shrugged and said “Wipe it up.”

  After dinner, young Jonah coopted Gordy to wrestle one of the filing cabinets into the back of his car and deliver it and Jonah home. They both seemed to assume that Ben would be going with them—especially once Jonah had made mention of the two flights of stairs at the other end, up to his mother’s flat—but I put the kibosh on that.

  “House rule,” I said. “Whoever cooks does the dishes too. That’s me and Ben, tonight. And the dishwasher’s gone, so…”

  So I got to keep him an hour longer, because house rules are inflexible, even in the last days of the house. I told him, when he grumbled: “It’s not about the house. It’s not about the rules either, in any inflexible sense. It’s certainly not about justice. It’s about choice and community, and not making work for other people. Sometimes a whole meal goes together in a single pot; sometimes you use every pan in the place, like we did tonight. We chose to do that,” or I did, which came to the same thing, “so this was our choice too,” the vast array of dirty dishes stacked on every surface in the kitchen. “Which means we get to deal with it, and leave things lovely for whoever makes breakfast in the morning.” Chances were, that would be me too, with or without my new assistant. I didn’t say so. If he wanted to be here early tomorrow—or at all—it had to come from him. Boys step out of the trees; we don’t call them forth. It’s another house rule, immutable. Still nothing to do with the house. It wasn’t about to change, just because the house went away.