by Toby Litt
The builders go.
CHAPTER 4
SIX or seven weeks later, a key in the door.
It was Paddy, on his own. He was carrying a cardboard box full of tea things. He seemed a little nervous as he stepped into the hall around two o’clock. During the next four hours, he would become worse then better then worse again. He called Agatha to let her know he was safely here and that everything so far had gone well. ‘When did they finish loading up?’ he asked, then, ‘So, when do you think they’ll get here?’ The removals lorry arrived about half an hour later. During this time, Paddy sat out in the garden and ate some sandwiches and then some biscuits. He had briefly examined the knocked-through living room but without a great deal of interest. ‘Good lunch?’ Paddy asked one of the removals men, the biggest.
‘Alright,’ he said. ‘Fish and chips.’
‘Good,’ said Paddy, not asking a question.
‘Not bad,’ said the man.
‘Would you like some more tea? Or coffee?’
‘A bit later,’ said the man. Paddy obviously wanted to be as welcoming as he could to these temporary guests. The removals men started to come through the front door with huge cardboard boxes; they wanted to know where to put them, and Paddy told them, saying thank you and thanks every time. ‘Front bedroom,’ he said, ‘thanks.’
The men worked quickly and after an hour asked for tea. Paddy was glad of this, he felt like they hated him – for being middle class and for moving into this house, which was probably bigger than theirs. He had become very aware of their bodies, and how they were sweating and becoming tired and all because a few weeks ago he had given his credit card number down the phone. These were men, he couldn’t but be conscious of the fact – and they made him feel boyish. Very often, whilst carrying the boxes in, they said, ‘Books,’ or ‘More books,’ or ‘You’ve got a lot of books, haven’t you?’ And they did – book-boxes filled almost half the glow-in-the-dark room. There were more in the back-to-front room, which the men called the lounge – this name made it seem alien to Paddy. One wall in each room was now part-covered by a second wall of cardboard.
The men sat with their teas in the garden, quite as if it were their own – they seemed to Paddy more in possession than him. He said nothing as one of them stubbed a cigarette out on the concrete slabs, and left it there. ‘Lovely,’ said the tall one. ‘Thank you,’ said the black one, as they handed him the mugs. Paddy had insisted they lock the back of the removals van whilst they were away from it. He had closed the front door himself.
The rest of the stuff only took about half an hour to unload. Paddy became worried about whether the tip he intended to give was going to be the appropriate amount – whether the men would despise him if it were too small, and despise him almost as much if he made it too cravenly huge. He had had the notes ready in his back pocket since lunchtime, just in case one of the men asked for it.
The last box came through the door at three o’clock exactly – it was full of philosophy books. The black man, whose name Paddy now felt guilty about having once heard and then forgotten, put it on top of the cardboard wall in the back living room. ‘That’s it,’ said the senior man. He got Paddy to sign a piece of paper, resting on top of one of the boxes. ‘Thank you,’ said Paddy, embarrassed. ‘Great job.’ The men had started for the door – demonstratively? contemptuously? – before Paddy remembered the tip. He gave it to the black man, asking him to share it with the others, then worrying (as he approached the door) that this had made him seem racist. The young black man smiled. ‘Thanks, mate,’ he said, and the mate made Paddy feel slightly better about the whole day. He, too, was a man – he had, in his own way, contributed to getting the job done.
They got in the van as he stood in the doorway to wave them off, unnecessarily. He looked for their faces in the mirrors – they went, with a couple of honks and some not, he thought, unfriendly waves.
Paddy went back inside a very unreal house – it seemed somehow to have lifted off the ground and was now setting itself down on his back, a responsibility. Already he had noticed things that would have to be done: nails to be banged in, paint to be retouched. He wanted to call Agatha but also wanted a few moments alone in the kitchen – he knew she was by now at her mother’s and would come over as soon as he let her know the men were gone. He didn’t want to lie. He didn’t want another cup of tea, either – already he felt spinny with caffeine and unused adrenaline. Instead, he filled a glass with water (proprietorial: his water) and carried it, not drinking, from room to room. He tried not to pause longest in the glow-in-the-dark room, but this was where the bulk of the boxes had been placed. Everything here had been carried by somebody else – somebody who didn’t care at all about what it meant. This made Paddy feel stupid towards his heavy possessions; perhaps he should get rid of some if not all of them – but most of them, the books, he needed for his work. Agatha, he remembered, had often tried to reassure him they didn’t have an extravagant amount of stuff.
He went downstairs into the kitchen and picked up his mobile, hesitated for reasons he didn’t care to analyse and then selected Agatha’s mother’s number.
‘We’re in,’ he said, and there was the smallest possibility he might start crying with relief – he didn’t, but he wanted Agatha to; she didn’t. She said she’d be over soon; not, he noticed, as soon as she could get there, just soon.
After putting the phone down, he wished he’d called earlier, for now the time alone in the house seemed useless.
He ripped the tape off the top of the nearest cardboard box and began to unpack food packets and tins into cupboards that Agatha was sure to rearrange.
CHAPTER 5
AGATHA arrived around quarter past seven, alone.
‘How was he?’ Paddy asked.
‘Thanks,’ she said.
‘How are you, I meant,’ Paddy corrected himself, too late.
‘No, you didn’t. He was asleep when I left. I didn’t want to wake him.’ She walked through into the front room, examined the new space. ‘How was today?’ she asked.
‘It was fine,’ said Paddy. ‘I’m a bit knackered – trying to keep control of everything; make sure it doesn’t go in the wrong place.’
‘Nothing’s broken that you saw.’
‘Not that I noticed.’ They talked about what they were going to have for supper, with no possibility of cooking. Paddy, who had been anticipating this conversation, suggested fish and chips; Agatha agreed.
He went down the road to get it, and she took a wander around the house. In the bathroom she found a large house-spider on the window-pane, beside the extractor fan. She wasn’t particularly scared of spiders – not more than anything else – and she knew she was supposed to think they were lucky in a house. One shouldn’t kill them, for they killed flies. She waited in the bathroom, watching it, so that it wouldn’t get away and be somewhere she didn’t know where it was. The spider didn’t move, but when she felt brave enough to look at it closely she could see it was rocking slightly, as if on unsteady ground or slightly drunk. When after ten minutes Paddy returned she called him upstairs, and he reacted to her pointing as if she’d been really afraid and he was her bold protector – went down into the kitchen and brought back a mug (the glasses still in boxes) and a tabloid newspaper left by one of the removals men. He reached out with the mug to trip the spider. ‘Careful you don’t kill it,’ said Agatha, a tone moving towards pleading in her voice.
‘Of course not,’ said Paddy. ‘Does it look like I’m trying to kill it?’
‘It’s unlucky if you do.’
‘I won’t.’ Gently as he could, as if the action were towards Agatha and not the spider, Paddy slid the paper under the rim of the mug.
‘I didn’t know you were so superstitious,’ he said.
‘I’m not,’ said Agatha, realising as she said it that she probably was, or was becoming so. Her reaction had surprised her, and this surprise upset her.
Paddy let the spider fr
ee on the sill, and Agatha slammed down the window so hard it almost cracked.
As they went back downstairs, she felt a disproportionate relief; she was familiar with her feelings, and what they now always referred to. This wasn’t something, right this moment, she wanted to think about; she had made a very conscious decision, standing for five minutes on the doorstep before she rang the bell, that she was going to be as ‘up’ as she could. It was intended to be for Paddy, her attempted positive mood, and for her imagined future self, looking back on their first night in the house. She didn’t want to remember an argument; they’d had an argument when Paddy left the old flat, and even though she knew it was a detail she would never forget, right now she couldn’t remember what or who had started it.
They celebrated by opening the bottle of champagne which was the only thing in their fridge apart from milk, put there by Paddy earlier in the day. ‘To the new house,’ proposed Paddy.
‘To the new life,’ Agatha added, trumped. They did not make eye contact, even as they clinked mugs.
‘It’s funny, being here at this time of day,’ said Agatha, ‘in the evening, when it’s dark.’
‘I know what you mean,’ Paddy replied, making the effort. ‘It’s almost as if we only own it at a certain time – at the time we first viewed it. Noon.’
‘That wasn’t really us, was it?’ Agatha asked, and it seemed a genuine question, but not one Paddy was able to answer.
They sat in the kitchen, reflected back at themselves in the glass of the French doors. ‘We’ll only be camping out for a couple of days,’ said Paddy. ‘I’ll put up shelves.’
‘I don’t mind,’ Agatha said.
‘I wish we could get rid of half of it.’
‘No,’ said Agatha, ‘the house will be almost empty as it is – we’ll need to buy things, not get rid of them.’
‘Books – I mean books. When will I ever read them all?’
‘On the train,’ she said, using practicality as aggression. Against the light from the upstairs window of the house behind theirs, Agatha could make out part of the shape of the appletree. She had a moment of wanting, very brutally, to be alone, for Paddy to go out somewhere and leave her and the house together.
The fish and chips were very good. Whilst they ate, Agatha found herself able to ask Paddy more questions about the day and how it had gone, and to half-attend to his answers, whilst at the same time examining her sensations of being in the new house, an old house, a house they owned, that they were going to live in together, had already started – the moment she crossed the threshold (had she kissed him?) – living in. He was enjoying his food a little too loudly, as he always did – he chewed like his father. She thought she had kissed him; if she hadn’t the omission would have been deliberate and she would have remembered it. One piece of cod tasted for some reason more strongly of the sea than those before, or perhaps she just for the moment became more aware of how it tasted. She wanted to say to Paddy, ‘We’re at the seaside,’ and then to add, ‘This is where we live.’ She knew another Agatha, a previous one, wouldn’t have hesitated to share her thoughts with Paddy. And she wondered why she was becoming so self-conscious now. It must have something to do with being in a new place; the build-up to the removal, as she remembered it, had been a mountain range of stress-peaks – phonecalls, arrangements, cancellations, rearrangements. Also, with Max not here, she was able to devote some of the attention she was always giving him towards herself – or the attention had decided that was where it wanted to spend its free time. She thought about the taxi ride over from her mother’s – couldn’t even remember if the driver had been black or white, couldn’t remember how much she had paid for it. This worried her; not that she’d blacked out, but that she might not have given him a tip. Of course, she had no memory of the interior of the cab, either – she tried to remember the smell of it, couldn’t. She had obviously been thinking very intensely as she was driven over, but about what? If she wanted to comfort herself, she believed it had been about Max and saying goodbye to sleeping-him – if only for a few nights, until they got themselves sorted. She knew that it was quite possible she’d been completely absent to herself, absent from herself, at least as a thinking person. This had happened so often, since, that she was aware of it as a habitual if not a usual state. What was different, now, was how terrified the idea of it was making her feel, looking back – almost as if she might as well have been dead. How long had it been since she had had a moment to take herself really seriously? She remembered hours in the maternity ward – several long days after the nurses had lost interest in her; she could not move, was being drained and lightly monitored and dosed and rehydrated. Her baby was not there to be brought or taken away, and she was determined not to break down completely, not till she was home – not to split into as many fragments as she felt she might; unfixable. This holding-together was impossible, the force of feeling was like a motorbike driven through her ribcage – or a golf swing through her head. Paddy had been there as often as he could manage, morning and evening, but that left her the afternoons and nights, the hours before the nurses came to give her drugs to make her sleep. She was all envy for the women she saw around her, those who had given birth, those who were pregnant, those just visiting who were only distantly concerned. How hard it had been and how sick, longing for lives that belonged to others – finding intricate explanations of herself, to herself; this was not her, she was quite unlike this. The biology of what would have been her soul had gone completely awry. Having split, doubled and grown her motherlove, all she had was one child to give it schizo-phrenically to – he would be approached by a hideous twin-headed mother who had not had time or chance to grow different, to customize herselves. What strange thoughts surrounded her then, and she was sure some of them were objective, waiting for her in the air, cobwebs to be walked through between far-apart forest trees. They couldn’t actually, truly, come from inside her – they were too merciless. The gauze cloaked her face, dryly adhered, and before she even had a chance to try to pull it off had become a layer of her own dear skin. Paddy was asking her something, for a second time, she could tell. ‘Yes?’ she said.
‘I said, Shall we go for a walk?’ Paddy said, for the third time. ‘Along the beach,’ he added nervously.
‘I’m very tired,’ said Agatha, ‘and though I’m hiding it very well, very upset.’
‘Tomorrow, then.’
CHAPTER 6
ALL Saturday Paddy put up shelves. In the afternoon Agatha’s mother called and held Max close up to the phone so they could speak to him and he could say words back. Again that evening Paddy asked Agatha whether she would like to go for a walk on the beach; she said no. And so he went on his own.
Sunday they spent taking books out of boxes and putting them, alphabetized, on new shelves.
‘What time shall we go?’ asked Paddy when they had finished and were having tea.
Agatha understood what he meant but pretended not to – she didn’t have a reason for this; she knew it would annoy him, and that they were going to have an argument anyway: one he would lose but she would feel worse about.
‘Go where?’ she said.
‘To fetch Max.’
‘Paddy,’ she said, ‘I’m going to ask my mother if she can keep him for a while.’
‘What’s a while?’
‘I don’t know yet –I haven’t thought about it properly.’
‘But the house is ready.’
‘Not really. There are still dangerous things around. We need to make it completely safe.’
Paddy looked carefully at Agatha. She was giving him false reasons, and he wanted to know why. ‘Tell me,’ he said, letting his tone explain.
‘I just,’ said Agatha, ‘I just want a little more time.’
‘Time for what?’ said Paddy, thinking time and space; end-of-relationship clichés.
‘Time for, I don’t know. Time for time. My mother enjoys having Max, and he enjoys being there. I need
longer than I’ve had.’
Her voice was hardening with each further word, and Paddy could tell how many words more, exactly, would have her shouting.
‘Alright,’ he said. ‘I’m missing him.’