Live; live; live

by Jonathan Buckley

  They ‘gathered’ that the window of the room in which I work looks over the rear of the house occupied by Ms Paget, formerly occupied also by Mr Judd, deceased.

  I confirmed this too.

  Was it ‘the case’ that on ‘the night in question’ I was at work in the room, at my desk, overlooking the house of Ms Paget?

  Indeed it was the case.

  ‘Did you notice anything unusual?’ enquired officer Boyle. ‘Any activity? Lights going on?’

  Had I observed anything unusual I would have reported it, as went without saying, I answered.

  Officer Gardiner, writing, made a light intervention: someone answering to my description had been seen in the vicinity of the house at approximately 1.30am.

  What, I asked, was meant by ‘vicinity’?

  Clarification was provided by officer Boyle: directly outside the house was what was meant.

  I might well have been passing Ms Paget’s house at that time; I had gone out for a walk.

  A small quick frown from officer Gardiner. ‘At one o’clock in the morning?’ he asked; the antennae were twitching.

  ‘Indeed.’

  Officer Boyle, solely by means of the eyebrows, requested an explanation.

  It is my habit to take a walk at that hour, weather permitting, I told her; I said something about the pleasures of a nocturnal stroll. The landscape of the town is clearer with no people in it. What I had to say seemed to interest officer Gardiner immensely; inspired, he scribbled half a dozen lines.

  A question from officer Boyle had to be repeated: I was distracted for a moment, having noticed the hands of her colleague. The fingernails were gnawed; they looked like flakes of cereal. I felt compassion: his job imposes considerable stress. And great tedium, I imagine. Much of his time must be spent on tasks that are a waste of everyone’s time, such as this one.

  When I passed Ms Paget’s house, I told them, the front door was closed; no damage was apparent.

  ‘So you took a good look at the door?’ asked officer Gardiner.

  The door was shut and undamaged, I repeated.

  Then officer Boyle asked: ‘How would you describe your relationship with Mr Judd?’

  Her colleague looked up from his notes to observe the reaction to the sudden swerve. But the interviewee was not to be thrown off-balance. ‘Very cordial,’ I said. It is one of the approved adjectives, I believe. Without prompting, I elaborated: I had spent a lot of time with Mr Judd; he was an interesting man, and I had enjoyed many conversations with him, conversations of some length, sometimes with Ms Paget present.

  To follow, the inevitable question: ‘And how would you describe your relationship with Ms Paget?’

  ‘Friendly,’ I decided.

  ‘Friendly,’ echoed officer Gardiner.

  The intention was that I should wonder what might be implied by the tone. I should be asking myself: ‘What do they know? What have they been told?’ But I had already imagined what they had been told. That was why they were here. It was disappointing, of course. But I simply said again: ‘Friendly.’ I asked if anything had been taken.

  Officer Boyle regretted that they could not divulge that particular piece of information.

  They were welcome to search the premises, I told them.

  That would not be necessary, officer Boyle assured me.

  I had another question: why would anyone imagine that I would force the door of a house that I could enter easily, at any time. There was no lock on one of the ground-floor windows at the back. And who would see me, if I were to go over the wall in the dead of night? On the street side, however, I would be conspicuous. So the idea was ridiculous. I had urged Ms Paget to improve the security, I told them.

  Ms Paget had been given advice to this effect, said officer Boyle. She thanked me for my time.

  Rising, officer Gardiner performed a rapid scan of the room. ‘Lot of books,’ he remarked, as if this in itself were sufficient ground for suspicion.

  •

  Seeing Erin in the mid-distance, I caught up with her and asked her what she had said.

  An obvious enquiry, but it seemed to surprise her. A long pause followed. It was not that she appeared to be giving the question some thought. Rather, it was as though she had been asked for a piece of information to which her brain did not have immediate access, though she should have known it, such as today’s date. Eventually she answered: ‘You know why.’

  I told her, gently, that I did not know why.

  She had explained, she reminded me, that she needed to be on her own, ‘for a while’.

  But her sister was staying, I pointed out.

  ‘That’s different,’ she told me.

  I said that if she wished to be alone I would not call round. ‘But you know where I am,’ I said.

  She looked straight at me, considering; it seemed that an apology of some sort might be made. ‘Yes,’ she said. She smiled, but the smile was vapid. It made me wonder if medication might now be involved. She looked down the street, as if something of mild interest had appeared there. From her left hand hung a plastic bag with a dozen tins of cat food in it; her fingers were turning white where the plastic cut in. ‘I’ll let you get on,’ I said.

  At the pedestrian crossing she walked out without looking, but on the other side she stopped to look right, then left, then right, then left, as though she had forgotten which way she had to go.

  •

  When I went round to the house, on the last day, the sister was standing at the ramp of the lorry, in discussion with a gigantic young man who appeared to be in charge of the operation. She glanced aside and raised a finger, instructing me to wait for a moment, until she had finished; I did not wait. Already the living room was empty, purged of almost every trace of Callum, of Kathleen, of Lucas, of Erin. Here and there, on the walls, lines and shadows of dust marked the location of things that had gone. I walked towards the window; the noise of my footsteps on the floorboards covered the sound of Erin coming in.

  When I turned, she was standing in the doorway, the young mother-widow, holding her daughter by the hand. For a moment I could not speak, such was the power of her appearance, a power that was amplified by the bareness of the room. Though I saw that she had been crying, the first thing I said was: ‘Are you all right?’

  The stupidity of the remark warranted the response, or non-response: Erin looked at me as if I were an object that had been placed in the room for no apparent reason. Her gaze slid to the windows, then back to me. ‘What do you think?’ she said, after ten seconds of silence. ‘No, Josh, I am not all right. How could I possibly be all right?’ The voice, the eyes, were those of a woman who needed to sleep, and of someone who knew much more of life than I did.

  All I then said was: ‘No. Of course.’

  Erin did not speak; her face told me nothing.

  I said: ‘I came to say goodbye.’

  She nodded; there was still no smile, but some softening was evident.

  Only now did I say something to Kit. She would have come to me, had her mother released her. Confused, she raised a hand, as if I were on the opposite bank of a stream. This upset me.

  Overhead, a piece of heavy furniture was being dragged. Someone shouted on the stairs, and at this point the sister appeared. She looked from me to Erin to me and again to Erin, and reached a conclusion instantly. She bent down to whisper in her niece’s ear, then carried her off.

  ‘I’ll be gone in a minute,’ I promised Erin, though what I had to say would have taken hours. I asked if we could go into the garden, away from the noise.

  She did not reply immediately, but continued to look at me, reading me. ‘There’s stuff I have to do,’ she said. The situation was too difficult for her.

  ‘I know,’ I said, ‘I know.’ But there were some things I had to clarify, I told her.

  ‘J
osh,’ she answered, ‘this isn’t the time, or the place.’

  I accepted that this was so. My attitude was one of acceptance; with this, I admit, I hoped to impress. I said a few more words, signifying sympathy. They were inadequate, and should not be recorded. Mid-sentence, I was interrupted by the sister. ‘You’re needed,’ she ordered Erin, from the doorway.

  I offered a hand to Erin, and we shook, with a glance that agreed there could, one day, be a time and a place.

  The sister lingered by the door, letting Erin pass. The look she aimed at me required a response; I could not let it go.

  •

  Last night: a dream of upsetting clarity, but not of Erin. I, or the subject of the dream, was playing in a park, throwing a ball with someone who was intermittently my father. The ball rolled towards my mother, who let it run past her. She seemed to be watching the game with interest, but as though the players were not known to her. The man who was approximately my father was making a great effort to be playful, and became so tired that he could not, in the end, find sufficient strength to lift the ball. It fell from his fingers into the grass, like a lump of iron. My mother was then asleep. She was grinding her teeth in her sleep, and I stood over her, afraid. At a glance from my father, a glance that was affectionate but seemed to suggest that I was behaving oddly, I woke up. Something in this was real, I know. There was much more, and some of that too might have been a rewritten memory, but already it has rushed away from me.

  •

  Sigmund Freud, Lucas informed me, was of the opinion that, before homo sapiens had become a linguistic species, telepathy would have been the means by which individuals communicated with each other. With the evolution of language and the ever-greater complexities of conscious thought, our telepathic faculties had become submerged, as it were. Most of us go through our lives unaware that our minds can speak to each other without words, said Lucas. In sleep, however, we might sometimes have an experience that makes us wonder. It is not uncommon, for example, for people to be alerted by a dream to the distress of a distant loved one; many women have learned in a dream of a sister’s pregnancy; people have dreamed of friends with whom they lost contact long ago, and then, days later, the friend has returned. The noise of our daytime thinking renders the ethereal messages inaudible, Lucas explained. At night, when circumstances are more favourable, the signal can get through.

  Dreams had led a number of people to summon Lucas, and he had been able to confirm that the dreams were communications – albeit blurred communications (the spiritual equipment of the lay person is less finely tuned than the professional’s, remember) – from the person whose absence had led the dreamer to contact him. And several of his clients had reported that, during or after their consultations, they had begun to have dreams in which the absent person spoke more clearly to them or appeared with extraordinary vividness. It seemed that as a result of Lucas’s attention, the client’s unconscious mind had become more sensitive, said Lucas; the process by which this increase in sensitivity sometimes occurs was a mystery. There had been cases in which dreams were shared by client and medium. For example, a man who had once been unfaithful to his wife, and suffered agonies of remorse for many years, a remorse that the forgiveness of his wife had done nothing to assuage, and which had intensified after her death, phoned Lucas to report a marvellous dream, in which he had been looking down on a vast plain of grass, on which many thousands of people were walking, in a procession towards a place that could not be seen, and although he was gazing down from the height of a skyscraper’s roof he could see precisely the face of his wife, as she stopped for a moment and looked up, as though sensing that her husband was there – ‘and she smiled,’ said Lucas, completing the report before the man could finish, because he too had seen the man’s wife looking up, in a dream of his own.

  •

  The father of the new family has been installing a table and chairs in the paved corner of the garden of the house that was the home of Lucas, the home of Lucas and Erin, the home of Kathleen, of Kathleen and Lucas, of Kathleen and Callum. At last satisfied with the arrangement, he sits in the chair that occupies the last segment of sunlight, and his gaze meanders over the wall of the garden; it pauses momentarily, at the place once occupied by the inscription cut by Callum. There is only an irregularity in the brickwork now; a scar, of no meaning to the new owners of the house. The spirit of Callum has gone from the garden, and the spirit of Lucas. One of the daughters runs out of the kitchen, and her father stands up, to seize her. An upward throw momentarily frees the girl from her father’s hands; a squeal of joyful alarm.

  I watch them, from the window from which I watched Lucas and Kathleen and Erin, the window of the room that has been mine since I was a child, in the house that is mine, which was my mother’s, and where once my father lived too, the father whose spirit is entirely absent, who has become barely a fume of memory. And here is the bowl that Kathleen made, and Lucas presented to me. I hold it, placing my thumb on the thumbprint that was pressed into the bowl when Kathleen held it into the glaze. Closing my eyes, I see Lucas, looking across the room at Kathleen, who is sitting in her chair, with her eyes closed; then her eyes open and she smiles at Lucas, as though in the knowledge that he knows the thoughts from which she has just roused herself. There is a vase beside Lucas’s chair; he cups the fat scarlet head of a peony, and examines it for a few seconds, before letting it go, as if it were a highly wrought and expensive item that he might once have been inclined to buy.

  •

  Furyū monji, meaning: independent of words or writing; no dependence on words or writing; without reliance on words or writing; not standing on words or letters; not expressed in words or writing. Instead, transmission from mind to mind, as Kathleen explained, forming a bowl of her fingers, supporting the bowl of my fingers, in which rested the bowl that she had made.

  *

  Alone, we are like the land in winter, when the earth, denuded, is revealed in its true form; the self, stripped of the vegetation of attachment, the complicating foliage of relationships, is purely itself when alone. We see who we are. Erin will come to understand, or so I hope, when the entanglements of Lucas at last fall away. And life has more urgency like this, when one is exposed. Contentment is often an insulation.

  •

  A scene. Every Wednesday, I take my seat at the same small corner table. I arrive on the stroke of 1.15, and what I eat is always the same. The routine has long been an aspect of the character. I am wearing the white shirt, of course. The summer plumage. My table is by the window, so that I can distract myself with the spectacle of the street, such as it is. The invariable choice of dish signifies a certain austerity, perhaps; or a lack of imagination. At 2pm I depart, whatever the weather.

  A menu is taped to the window, facing outward, close to my seat. I become aware that a woman is standing outside, scanning the list; I look up, and at that moment a girl, perhaps already a teenager, steps out from behind the woman; the girl is Kit; the woman, Erin.

  A mime of astonishment is performed. A minute later, an embrace. It is a tentative manoeuvre; Erin receives me as though taking hold of a parcel of unwieldy dimensions. In her face there is evidence of anxieties of some duration. But the smile, as she reintroduces Kit, is the smile of many years before.

  We are walking on the seafront. The loss of Lucas is no longer acute. The sadness has been accommodated. It has become a foundation. We walk side by side. Inevitably, we talk about Lucas. He is with us. We sit on the shingle. Erin has much to say, about Lucas, about Kit. At last she has emerged fully into herself. I will not say that I love her. Words are too precarious. I could place a hand on hers. Everything is forgiven. But the moment must not be momentous. This is important. It must be light, and I must have patience. But things would go from there. It could happen. If not as I have imagined, in another way. Or this may be all I have. I don’t know.

  Jonathan Buckley has written elev
en novels, including Nostalgia, The river is the river, and The Great Concert of the Night, which is also published by New York Review Books. He was the 2015 winner of the BBC National Short Story Award. He lives in Hove, England.