by Tom Vowler
Once Greta left for the real world each day, he kept the mornings full with the list of housework she’d left him, the undertaking of which he found surprisingly gratifying. The afternoons, though, were interminable and harder to fill. He tried building a replica of the Mayflower that would apparently fit in a bottle, but the slight tremor in his right hand he’d hidden so well from occupational health, rendered the activity impossible. Collecting stamps made him feel older than his 54 years and the garden had always been Greta’s preserve.
‘You can mow the lawn but leave the flora – you’ll only ruin it,’ which in truth was somewhat of a fantasy of his these days. Just to see her face.
Other pastimes were explored, though with little success. His homemade beer wasn’t fit for the homeless – smelling faintly of kerosene and tasting little better, and the guitar, he discovered, required more patience and longer, less stubbier fingers than he possessed.
Meanwhile the vacancies pages seemed to diminish each week, and as the months since his last employment grew, so the interviews dried up. He began applying for all manner of work: security guard, chauffeur, driving the children’s train at the model village – but it seemed the world could manage quite happily without his talents. His redundancy package, he calculated, would last another eleven weeks, at which point he would have to suffer the indignity of asking his wife to buy the four cans of Boddington’s that, on finishing the blended whisky, had become his evening ritual. Perhaps he should buy one of the super strength lagers, which offered a greater ABV-to-cost ratio, albeit at the expense of quantity. Greta used to indulge in a little gin, which would be better than nothing, but even that had become victim of her new regime.
‘Stefan says alcohol dampens the fire within us,’ she said.
He needed to think more laterally, like the guy he’d read about who had a foolproof system for the horses, though obviously you had to send him an initial investment, and surely if it was so prosperous, why did the guy need to share it?
Later at dinner his wife scowled across the table.
‘Something’ll turn up,’ he said wistfully.
‘Where’s the man I married?’ she spat.
He tried to remember, but the images appeared grainy, as if those days had been incorrectly archived, or had happened to someone else. Perhaps they should have had children, adopted once their own had been ruled out. They would come home to visit every now and then in the holidays, bring their own children.
In an attempt to ward off loneliness, Roland found himself filling the days with superfluous appointments.
‘Take one each morning with food,’ said his GP, handing him the prescription. He never took the pills; it was just nice to visit someone regularly – sort of a trivial case of Munchausen, he supposed. In the waiting room one week he picked up a leaflet for an ME support group, which he attended for a while, taking advantage of the tea and cake on offer. He never quite understood how talking about their illness helped them, yet he was sorry to leave when Janet, the group’s founder and ME veteran of twenty-two years, learned he was only a little bit tired, and even then only for around half an hour or so mid-afternoon, whereupon he would take a nap. Walking home it annoyed him, how people were so precious about their clubs, how you had to be this or that to join them. He should start his own, a group for redundant men whose wives ate non-food and were into magic. They would meet at his house every Tuesday afternoon, eat cake, drink tea and then go home for naps.
In the meantime, after his domestic duties each day, Roland took to short circuitous walks through the suburban streets with their manicured gardens, striding purposefully as if his destination wasn’t merely his own home. His now-empty tan briefcase accompanied him as a prop, giving, he hoped, the façade of respectability. Neighbours were greeted by his affected smile, but it was obvious they could smell his failure, giving him a wide berth lest it proved infectious. Their pity bore into him as he walked past: Washed up at that age, such a shame. The less brutish ones would sometimes engage him: Did he want to join their book group? Perhaps he could take the minutes at the next neighbourhood watch meeting. All very tempting, but he knew a thing or two about ‘groups’ now, and would not be rushing to join any more just yet.
As the weeks passed, despondency thick as treacle fell upon him, helped in no part by having to cut his Boddington’s intake to two cans per night. Grooming was soon neglected; seemed it was mostly for other people’s benefit anyway. Everyone should grow a full beard once in their life, he thought, although his own proved to be a rather patchy affair. Pyjamas and a dressing gown served well unless he left the house, which he rarely did now. He wondered if reading might not be something he’d enjoy, but the shelves were increasingly full of Greta’s New Age tripe, endless spines of pulp on the occult, crystals, mysticism and witchcraft – written, no doubt, by Stefan and his kind. The library was an option, but gazing in the window one time he saw that ME Janet worked there – presumably when she wasn’t tired – and the thought of asking her what books she recommended terrified him.
Roland’s marriage – unspectacular but until now functional – drifted aimlessly as if routine had been its anchor, Greta withdrawing herself from him a little more each day, first verbally, which suited him, then physically, which he couldn’t work out whether it suited him or not.
‘I can’t think about all that when there’s this financial worry,’ she said. ‘And besides, look at the state of you.’
This coming from someone with a wart the size of a garden pea on her nose. How had he put up with it all these years? In fact he was certain it had grown of late, with one or two additional hairs sprouting proudly.
Perhaps his mood would be improved by a little how’s-your-father, yet the prospect of such seemed as unlikely as it had ever been. Returning early from work one day, Greta caught him masturbating into her Kays catalogue, which in a way he was grateful for, the activity a rather desultory, tiresome affair, one he could anticipate no end to.
‘At your age!’ she said, banishing him to the spare room, where he found the abandoned Mayflower and a life-sized cardboard cut-out of Stefan, beneath which the words AWAKEN THE MAGIC IN YOU appeared.
Each night that week, as she went to bed, his wife kicked the door, cursing and muttering, cackling almost.
‘Things are going to change, Roland, just you wait!’
The pain, when it came, seemed to manifest somewhere deep in his marrow, as if the very core of him was sick. Coupled with this was an exhaustion the like of which he’d not known, the sort of lethargy that made flu seem a triviality. The sort of tiredness ME Janet spoke of.
‘A nasty bug,’ the doctor Greta eventually agreed to call out said. ‘Lots of funny things going around. Keep the fluids up, right as rain in no time.’
But no time came and went. As did lots of time.
By now a single trip to the bathroom took a steady hour of building up to, the resulting fatigue rendering him bedridden until the next call of nature arrived. He’d assumed his wife’s antipathy for him would rise another notch or two, but if anything her voice mellowed, her little digs receding to nothing. She started to fetch him his meals on a tray, real food, porridge and cake and endless cups of tea, which he rather felt he deserved at the moment. After his dinner she’d even bring up an open can of Boddington’s, and when he asked for a second, to help the aches, she tutted but in a friendly way.
‘Got to keep the fluids up, I guess,’ she said.
And if it wasn’t for feeling utterly lousy, he wondered if he hadn’t found his ideal lifestyle after all. Perhaps, when he started to get better, he wouldn’t tell people. No point rushing these things, better to make sure.
The doorbell brought him out of a fitful sleep, one which had featured Stefan showing him pictures of ME Janet in a Kays catalogue, except on closer examination he saw that the model was actually Greta, not as she was now but when he first met her, which he supposed was rather beautiful. Come to think of it, she wa
s looking a lot younger these days. The doorbell might have been part of the dream sequence had there not followed three evenly-spaced knocks. It was perfectly reasonable to ignore it, he said to himself, his energy levels at an all-time low, and yet each time he thought the caller had given up, the bell would sound again, followed by three more knocks.
It must have taken him several minutes to negotiate the stairs, but he could see the silhouette of person or persons through the frosted glass. Assuming it was someone recruiting membership for a group, he called out that he wasn’t interested, that he was going to start his own.
‘Delivery for Greta,’ came back the reply. ‘Needs a signature.’ And so reluctantly Roland opened the door.
It took both of the well-built delivery men to lift the box from the back of the van and heft it up the garden path. After he signed on his wife’s behalf, the men left it upright in the hallway, sniggering to each other when he asked what it was.
‘An upgrade,’ one of them shouted from the gate.
Another Stefan cut-out, he thought. A month ago he might have opened it, when curiosity was still something he was capable of, but in truth he felt like death. No, not like death, because death surely felt better than this. And so he started up the stairs, when a noise, barely audible, came from the box. There it was again. He must have imagined it, though, because for all the world it sounded like a cough.
Fireflies
The copper-coloured sky of an hour ago has darkened, although there is still enough light to walk by. From the tall trees inland you hear an exodus of rooks, wings clattering upwards in applause. You call to your son, who lags behind, this annual pilgrimage along the coast path, the emotion of the thing, taking its toll.
So many hours of your own adolescence spent along this path and you strain to hear the sounds of youth: the purr of your reel once cast, the sonorous slop of weights striking distant water, the rhythmic tick tick as you wound in the slack.
‘Is it much further?’ he says. You’ve promised him a shandy at the pub.
Earlier, after placing the flowers down, you stopped to watch a cormorant skim above the water, tight to the surf, its elongated neck cleaving the air like an arrow shaft. You hoped for a kestrel, hovering at eye level, out over the cliff edge, but there’ve been none. She always spotted birds first, when the two – and later three – of you walked this path, her keen eye filtering out all irrelevance, a distant silhouette identified before its presence was even known to you. Watching your son you wonder how much of this she passed down, what her legacy will be.
You look out beyond the headland, picture the rusting hulks of wrecked ships that ghost the sea floor, forests of kelp slowly claiming them. The wind is gusting now, blinding you if you look into it, the air sharp, briny. Herring gulls and fulmars ride the thermals in long, graceful arcs, the easy rhythm of their flight soothing you a little. The gulls on the beach below issue proud, barbarous cries as they delve into the seaweed or jab at stranded cuttlefish. Beyond them, groups of sanderlings gather on the tideline in search of sand shrimps, their forms scuttling comically back and forth with each breaking wave, froths of foam eddying around them.
A year on and you still wonder what kind of a life can be fashioned in her absence.
You look out to the open water, its irregular surface specked with half a dozen fishing boats. A tanker sits sombrely on the horizon. For a moment you think you see the dorsal fin of a basking shark cutting through the swell a few hundred yards out, but by the time you find the spot with the binoculars, it has gone. Most, if not all of them, will have left for the warmer waters of the south by now. On the tip of the promontory ahead, sea heaves at rock, slamming into coves, the water forced up a blowhole with each wave, spuming into the wind.
As dusk draws in you climb a steep section of the path, sit on the tip of a headland looking out to sea and wait for him to catch up. A fishing boat flanks the coast, its silhouette crimping the water’s surface, the chunter of its engine pulsing faintly up to you both. Behind, in the vessel’s wake, the sea gleams a luminous azure, as phosphorescent algae are ignited by the turbulence, giving the boat a shimmering tail as if a million fireflies were following it.
You watch your son blow into his hands, steel yourself for the year he won’t want or need to come on this walk, his own life taking over, the memory of her receding a little more. You wonder if you’ll be strong enough on your own.
Inland the last of the day’s light washes over the fields. Ahead you can just make out the bone-white walls of the pub along the coast.
Your arm around his shoulder, you want to ask: Am I enough?
‘Race you there,’ you say instead.
Acknowledgements
Fiction is never the endeavour of one person alone,1 and I’d like to offer heartfelt thanks to the following people, whose inimitable presence in my life helped shape the book you are holding. They say the greatest gift a writer can receive from his or her parents is a dysfunctional childhood, and I would like to express particular gratitude to Les and Sandra on this account. Certainly the bouts of moderate violence and enduring disdain they held for one another would weave its way into any number of characters and set-pieces. And imagine how that scene in ‘Confessions of a Loss Adjuster’ would have turned out had my father not arrived home from work unexpectedly that day in 1993, to find my mother in close liaison with Craig from HR. Further, although unclear which set of chromosomes bestowed on me the mild asthma that led to my non-attendance at school for much of the winter term, I am grateful for the introversion, and as a result the bookishness, this resulted in. Particular mention must also be made of Mr ********,1 my erstwhile secondary school teacher, who in his own delightfully abusive way ran the after-school ornithological society, which although not explicitly prohibiting female members, never seemed to acquire any. Although not strictly biographical, the teacher in ‘Raven Mad’ drew heavily on those endless evenings in the bird hide at Cley Marshes, warmed only as we were by the steady furnishing of brandy. Lastly, credit must go to Mrs Artherton,2 who as a bored suburban housewife seduced my best friend, Richard Hester,3 after we had cleaned her husband’s car in the school holidays. Their summer-long tryst, as well as underwriting much of our business’s modest income that year (and ensuring Mr Artherton’s car was the cleanest this side of Fakenham), had me spending short but frequent periods in the Arthertons’ boutique library.
* * *
1 Except that it kind of is.
1 Name redacted for fear of libel suit, though boys in Years 1 through 4 will know who I mean.
2 Real name used, as the Arthertons later moved to Canada, where this book will likely not be published.
3 Ditto. He’s probably still dining out on the anecdote.
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