Inch Levels

by Neil Hegarty

  She smiled, a little tightly. ‘Sam isn’t on duty today, Patrick. You’ll have to put up with me today.’

  ‘You sound harried. Busy today, is it?’

  ‘No rest for the wicked, Patrick,’ she said.

  ‘Are you wicked, Samantha? I wouldn’t have imagined you’d have many opportunities to be wicked.’ He said this with a lilting sweetness. He had closed his eyes now – but she was on the attack already. A word or two would do it.

  ‘More opportunities than you, Patrick,’ she said – and his eyelids flickered. He said nothing for a moment – and when he spoke again, the sugary tones had vanished.

  ‘Where’s my tea?’ he snapped. ‘It’s getting later and later. What time do you call this?’

  ‘I call it four o’clock,’ she said.

  ‘Then you’d better go and see what the hell’s going on.’

  And she went, the not-Samantha, the soles of her shoes squeaking on the floor. He could see a small and satisfied smile curling her lips.

  And that was that. He didn’t come first for Sam or her abrasive colleague or anyone else, not any longer: this was the sad lesson of infirmity. What about inside his own head? – did he still come first in his own head? Hm, maybe not: another lesson, to be absorbed.

  Only of the past – or aspects of it.

  Which was something: something to grasp on to, as nurses turned him and massaged his buttocks and God knows what else.

  ‘Stop that!’ he’d said recently, for someone’s fingers felt icy cold on his buttocks. Whose fingers? – but that was the worst thing, the most humiliating thing, for he couldn’t recall. What? – someone’s hands on your buttocks, on your own buttocks? And you didn’t even know whose hands, whose cold fingers they were?

  It was no wonder he was finding a refuge in the past. And that day: the day of the painting, the Tate, the diesel-belching red London bus – that was the day he met Robert for the first time, his life – even if he didn’t know it – turning smoothly and silently on a pivot.

  They had gone to the Tate to try to cool down, was the truth of the matter: literally to cool down, mainly, for this was the boiling summer of 1976 and they were red in the face and sweating as they wandered through London. Margaret was living there at the time: she had been unhitched, boyfriend-less, chafing with frustration – but all this had now changed. She had taken up with a new fella.

  Robert, from Belfast. Patrick didn’t like the sound of him – not one little bit. And they would be meeting up later that day.

  They walked slowly along Millbank, and found a bus to take them to Piccadilly Circus: then plunged along Regent Street to do some shopping. London was looking a little tatty, Patrick thought, in the heat: the parks baked and yellow, the leaves dull and dry on the plane trees. A gallery, they thought, to cool off, and then we’ll be ready for some shopping. That ought to do it. Pegwell Bay, first.

  ‘It could be us,’ said Margaret. She stood considering the painting: the mercifully cool air hummed with quiet footfalls, with the unshakeable, carrying confidence of middle-class English voices. Supported voices, thought Patrick, who had been reading about supported voices, and who now imagined a room filled with muscular, toned diaphragms. Supported English voices. Irish voices, he thought, hardly ever sound like this: our diaphragms, he thought, must sag in the middle.

  Now he frowned. ‘Us?’ he said. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I don’t really mean like us,’ Margaret said, still examining the painting.

  ‘No, because there’s only one child.’

  She turned, triumphant. ‘There! You were looking at the child too!’

  He paused. It’s true, he was. ‘I suppose I was.’

  ‘You were. And so was I.’

  She’d been getting deep into psychology lately, he knew: into mother figures and father figures and family dynamics. It all sounded a bit heavy. He watched her turn to the painting, as though to recharge her vision, and then back to him.

  ‘Here we are, two adults, still identifying with the child in the painting. Now,’ she said, ‘what do you suppose that signifies?’

  ‘Oh, signifies,’ he mocked, fearing the ocean floor soon to fall away from under his feet, fearing he will soon be out of his depth, fearing he will be at sea amid this mass of psychology that is – surely – coming his way.

  ‘Here we are,’ Margaret went on, staking out her position inexorably, ‘on our own. Grown up. Have been grown up for a couple of years now. Away from home: we can do what we want. We look at a painting. We see a child – and it’s the child we identify with.’

  Patrick looked at the painting again: at the crumbling chalk cliffs and the pools in the sand, at the comet streaking silently through the sky. At the child. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘I see what you mean.’

  Margaret nodded. ‘Arrested development,’ she said with a sort of horrible satisfaction. ‘Both of us.’

  He flinched. ‘Come off it.’ And regretted the phrase at once, as his sister took offence.

  *

  ‘Come off it,’ he said, and Margaret felt her temper rise, her face redden with something more than the heat of the day.

  ‘Listen to me!’ she said. She felt her temper in her throat, in her chest, a sort of pulsing, beating. She had a quick temper.

  Her mother, too. Snapping at her. ‘What man would have you, if you go on like that? A fishwife. Who’d have a fishwife around them?’

  Well. She had a man now. They’d be meeting him later, in Hampstead, and she was not looking forward to the experience. And now she embraced her anger. The heat, the pollution of the city, her environment: all conspiring against her all day – and now here was Patrick too, contradicting her flatly, unpleasantly. ‘Listen to me!’

  She began to talk about Sarah. Their mother who never nurtured, who seemed to have no idea how to nurture, who undermined them, who didn’t seem much to like her husband, her children; who kept them in bondage.

  ‘Bondage!’ Patrick blinked. ‘Bondage! This isn’t the Bible. Bondage,’ he scoffed. ‘The Jews were kept in bondage,’ he said, ‘in Babylon.’ (Wasn’t it Babylon?) ‘Not us.’

  ‘She hasn’t allowed us to grow up,’ Margaret said. ‘That’s the truth.’

  They quarrelled, there in the handsome, spacious room. Other visitors sidled past, or lurked in the corners, under the arches, to listen to their distinctive accents, their Irish voices. They quarrelled – but they often quarrelled. It meant less than the rapt bystanders seemed to think it meant. Later, they walked down Millbank to the bus stop. Still discussing their mother, but this time with less passion. The city was hot – but these two, suddenly, were not.

  *

  They did quarrel a good deal. They were bound together – which did not mean they were a pair of ghastly ideal children, lifted from a sickly-sweet Victorian Christmas card. Not at all. They went on scrapping their way through their youth – physically, sometimes, taking lumps out of one another if the opportunity arose. Margaret, being older and bolder, tended to emerge triumphant from these early confrontations. Later, as they were forced to graduate into verbal weaponry – though still sharp ones, cudgels and axes – Patrick managed to finesse his verbal dexterity a little, to rile Margaret that way, to drive her up the walls with anger and frustration.

  Temper, said Sarah. So undesirable in a lady.

  Leave her alone, said Martin, for Christ’s sake.

  But Margaret found herself a man in the end – after the longest of searches. The countryside trawled with exceptional thoroughness; and the end result hardly the most prepossessing specimen in the world. Robert: lurking in a dark corner, with tendrils of ivy winding around his ankles.

  Margaret blamed her mother for it. For this lack of romantic interest. For the shape of her life. For everything. For all her woes. With justification, as Patrick came to realise. ‘I wish we could get to the bottom of it,’ he said one day. Meaning: why did their mother withhold her love?

  But he never did get to the
bottom of it.

  6

  Sarah would take the pan of uneaten porridge every morning, and step out of the back door, and scrape the cold, congealing contents of the pan onto the lawn. Onto the same spot, and for the birds – but the birds would not eat it; and over time a bald patch formed in the grass.

  ‘The birds don’t like porridge,’ Patrick said one day, knotting his school tie, donning his blazer; Margaret, in her dreary bottle-green school gabardine, was already out the door and away. ‘Why don’t you put it in the bin instead?’

  Cassie was busy with tea and toast; she glanced at him. Martin was absorbed in the football results. His mother, saucepan in hand, paused.

  ‘You’ll be late for school. Go on, now.’

  He went. The porridge was never explained.

  Later, as a teacher, Patrick had a natural inclination for spotting a student – a child – in trouble at home: a child spinning untethered by an absence of love, by violence, by the domestic disorder which comes in a multitude of forms. He had an eye for it: he helped to bolster such children, sensitively, invisibly.

  This was the repayment of a debt, yes – but he would have done it anyway. He understood those domestic landscapes that are so crucial, that are everything in the eyes of a child. Mental maps, as he thought of them – thinking of his atlases and charts and books of flags stuffed into a cabinet at home – in which each aspect and factor crucial and comforting ought to have its fixed place, with luck.

  In his case, in Margaret’s case, no such luck.

  Of course there were landscapes and terrains available to them, as to any child. In this case, though, these places seemed lined with trenches, pocked with potholes. It was easy to turn an ankle on such terrain: to go flying, to be bruised and marked. His mother dug the trenches, carved out the potholes; or so it seemed to him. Cassie was there too, but Cassie could not compensate, not completely.

  What did he remember?

  The suburban house, into which the family moved when the children were both very small: the first house he could remember. A big bungalow, long and low, sporting a breakfast nook complete with comfortable banquettes and a skylight overhead onto which the Derry rain pattered and occasional hailstones clattered, and – best of all – snow occasionally fell, softly and envelopingly in winter, covering the sky overhead with a thick, white blanket. A thrilling early memory.

  A high shelf in the hall on which his mother placed her prized copper bowl: it would catch the evening sun and flame out in red and orange.

  ‘Where did it come from?’ he asked one day. She had taken a chair and lifted it down with tender care; and dusted and polished it; and now was returning it to its high shelf. A little dent, a notch, shadowed its broad lip.

  Sarah glanced briefly down. ‘Never you mind.’

  What else? His bedroom, with a window out of which he could hop, directly into the long back garden: a pampas grass tossed out there in the wind, with a belt of trees to the rear, screens of shrubs to either side in which a small boy could scout, lose himself, embark on a journey of exploration. There was the gap in the fence where the neighbouring garden could be accessed, where apples could be stolen from an apple tree in autumn; there was a tangle of blackberry brambles that had been allowed to do their own thing, peaceably, wildly, with a tribute of berries annually. And there, the hide colonised by a local tabby who, docile and easy, would allow her belly to be tickled, her ears to be scratched. Here a little boy could lie in dry grass and look up at a screen of branches and beech leaves, into white and blue sky.

  Mental maps, as he thought of them, later: incontrovertible maps that stood the test of time and memory, that could not be contradicted; that made their paper equivalents flimsy, anorexic things.

  In those earliest days, he put together a map of solidity, of security, compensating for their absence elsewhere. The house was here and the garden here; the beech trees there and the blackberries there. He and Margaret hunted in long grass; or he was alone, daydreaming on warm, bare earth. Rain falling in the world outside – as he staked out the dry hide, with the amiable tabby for company. Cassie in the kitchen, the rattling sound of an oven being opened, being closed. Discoveries to be made that were already conceived and understood. Warmth and routine, endlessly fixed and unchanging.

  And, eventually, the field notes, the observations that threw up other information, that introduced discord, that could no longer be ignored. The world at length beginning to vibrate and to tremble and then to shake. A body, the body of a young man right there on the footpath, as fifteen-year-old Patrick walked home slowly from school. Not to be stepped over, exactly – for there were soldiers and policemen, and white security tape snapping in a brisk wind – but as good as. A little blood from the neck wound, dark on the tarmac. ‘Did you walk straight past?’ said Sarah, pressed up against the worktop in the kitchen. ‘You always just keep walking. Remember that for next time.’ And Cassie, gesturing to a plate of buns on the table.

  The outside world, and the domestic world too – the world as a whole, which one day placed its boot, its heel against the windows of the house and kicked, and sent shards of glass flying through the air. And in the process sealed a relationship – in blood, in dreadful gravity; and with manifold consequences.

  *

  It had rained the previous evening, and after the rain frost – and now, on the following afternoon, the pools of water by the side of the road were still iced over. Patrick set his heel on one of these pools; the disc of ice moved slightly. He brought his heel down on the ice: though it did not shatter, fine, white cracks radiated out from the point of impact.

  ‘You could go skating on that,’ he told Margaret, ‘if it was big enough.’

  She nodded. She was distracted – and with good reason: there were crowds clustered all around them, they were being jostled a little as they walked – and they were walking slowly, with thousands of people behind them and thousands in front. The march was bigger, apparently, than anyone had anticipated.

  Which was good.

  And something else. It was good craic too. ‘This is good craic,’ Patrick murmured and again Margaret smiled, nodded. People were having a laugh as they walked: the air filled with buzz, with chatter. This wasn’t what he’d expected.

  His first march.

  Not Margaret’s first march, of course. She’d been to some, up in Belfast. Not good craic at all, those ones, she said – and Patrick could well believe it, Belfast being Belfast. They walked slowly downhill, in the midst of the crowd. They passed the cathedral, they passed the swimming pool, they passed terraced houses burned out now, they passed the snapped trunks of saplings, planted in a fit of unrealistic optimism, they passed the derelict bakery. And now the atmosphere began to alter: he could feel the change sweep rapidly through the crowd. The clatter of the helicopter – invasive, unpleasant, but of course expected, anticipated. It wasn’t the sound of the helicopter that caused electricity suddenly to charge the air, the chatter of voices to die to a murmur. He sees faces glancing up and over: a sea of heads snapping up to the left and staring and then snapping back again, snapping straight ahead. He looked to the left himself, and saw snipers, armed, lying rigid on the roof of the Sorting Office building. He looked away, he saw Margaret look away – in disdain, and in fear.

  Amazing, how rapidly loud chat could fall away, how rapidly tension and fear could sweep through a crowd. He could feel it. He didn’t say much and neither did Margaret: instead, they continued to walk slowly. The sun had long since reached its zenith and was now, on this late January day, beginning to sink in the sky: already, long, thin shadows were stretching from the edges of the crowd. They walked slowly and he took in this new electric charge.

  ‘Don’t go,’ their mother had said. Especially to Margaret: let Patrick go if he must, but Margaret should stay at home. But no: the days when Margaret would stay at home were long past. She was a university student, she was old enough to make her own decisions. She was nineteen
years old.

  ‘I’m going,’ was all she said. Their mother pursed her lips at that, but said nothing more. Cassie watched silently from the kitchen door as they donned scarves and hats and winter coats; low winter sunlight glinted red on the copper bowl on the shelf in the hall. They walked slowly into town – a long walk from their suburban home, though not unpleasant on this fine day – in time to blend with the middle of the crowd as it snaked down Creggan Street. The place was packed.

  Speeches were to come a little later. They arrived at the corner of William Street and Patrick looked south and saw the road blocked, the usual makeshift arrangements in place: a stage set up on the back of a parked lorry, festooned with placards and banners; and more crowds on the far side, a sea of dark clothing and white faces. He looked east and saw the narrow mouth of William Street blocked by a barrier where it met the city centre, sealed by more soldiers with helmets, more guns. He looked north and saw Little James Street blocked by another barrier, by more men, helmets, guns, by the high wall of the Sorting Office. He looked away and then behind, to the mass of dark clothing and white faces that filled the street behind.

  Not trapped, no question of a trap. Yet his instincts began to tighten, to whine, a shrill noise on the edge of his hearing; and he took Margaret’s hand. Just in front, the flats rose on one side of the road: three high-rise buildings, incongruous in this flat landscape of small houses and small terraces. The flats were sheer, jerry-built, grouped around a dismal car park. Beyond them, in the distance, the hill crowned by grey buildings jumbled in behind the line of the city walls. There were figures moving on the walls itself: soldiers, of course, with binoculars and cameras and more guns, manning their observation post up there, taking in the scene. He glanced up, and then away. Let them look, he thought brazenly: much good may it do them.

  The multitude was still moving behind them, packing the streets still more tightly. Patrick felt crowded, suddenly: his shoulders jostled, Margaret jostled. He loosened his grip on her hand, and took her elbow instead, and they shoved their way out a little from the crowd, stepped towards the nearest entrance to the flats complex: a narrow, shadowed slot between two of the buildings. For a breather. There was another barricade set here – in fact a mass of rubble, three or four feet high, set up this time by the people themselves – and here they stopped, lodged in shadow between the rubble and the sheer wall and a phone box. For their breather.