But actually, at that very moment, the two women eating nearby – Flo and Dot – were having a miserable conversation that was deeply interesting. Flo was fleshy and had a necklace tan. Dot looked like a librarian and had a bun that wanted to come undone. It appeared that Flo had lent money to Dot, who didn’t have the money to repay her. Dot’s lips were drawn in a line over her teeth as if to stop whatever she had to say from spilling out. Flo was philosophical. Don’t worry about the money, she said, the money will come. But Dot was saying, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry and gripping the menu as though the pressure of her fingers was holding everything together. What are you sorry about? Flo said. What do you have to feel sorry for? Everything will be OK in the end. They’d been drinking all night, so when the music changed it didn’t take much encouragement for Dot to stand up and start dancing, rocking from side to side, raising one leg and then the other in a sort of gumboot dance. At first I turned away, because dancing embarrassed me, but then, because Dot was such a beautiful dancer – the way her body moved was just so joyful – I didn’t have it in me not to look. After a while Flo started dancing too but her limbs were awkward and disconnected, like an insect dancing on its hind legs, so that it looked less like a dance and more like a struggle. When the chorus came on – All that’s real and all that matters is love – Dot opened her arms in the general direction of the restaurant in a gesture which seemed to say, Come into me. All the folds of my soul are open to you, then leant over and seemed, although I’m sure I’m wrong about this, to be showing us her ass.
Chapter 6
You see, Touw thought he
could divine water
At eight o’clock the next morning I woke to the sound of the chain securing the construction site rattling as it fell to the ground. Then a thudding began which stopped a second later only to resume a minute or so after that. I pulled the duvet over my head but the fabric seemed to amplify the sound rather than muffle it. In any case, the orchestration of banging was so unpredictable – it had no rhythm or sonic organisation at all – that it was impossible to sleep because all I could think about was the thudding; even when it stopped I was just waiting for it to start up again.
I went up to the solarium. For weeks the construction site had been quiet. The surveyors had come and done their surveys and the only other activity was somebody occasionally shifting the digger from one side of the site to the other. But now, when I looked behind the house, as though somebody had come overnight and cut away the mountain with a razor, all that was there was a flat plane with a metal storage container on it. Two men in yellow vests were walking around the site. One made his way along the side closest to the fence with an armful of pegs (long metal sticks folded at one end), pushing their tips into the earth at regular intervals, while the other, following behind, knocked them in with a maul.
Through the smell of construction came the smell of the sea. The sea that morning was a uniform nothingness with a purple-grey hue. Dense grey clouds were rolling in. The voice in my head, Hannah Kallenbach’s voice, said, It wants to be a storm. But for me the clouds held no more shape than a dream. What can a man say about a cloud without sounding like a fool? The driedup herbs in the planter looked grey. When the sun withdrew behind the clouds, my old white T-shirt looked grey and the concrete slabs lying by the side of the road looked doubly grey. The man with the maul, who gazed up from time to time, his eyes sunk into their deep grey sockets, at the length of land still to be pegged, looked like a character from a Cold War film. Grey trees. Grey trees and houses. All around, as the clouds moved, one species of grey gave way to another. It dulled things, yet the overall effect was not dull. It was compelling somehow to sit there, just registering these shifts. The weight of the clouds didn’t dilute the light. Quite the opposite, it distilled it. Since although the light – that of it which emerged through the thick canopy of clouds – had lost its brightness, it had, at the same time, acquired an intensity and restraint, as if in struggling through the clouds it had acquired something of their density.
The man with the maul had taken off his vest and the sea haze made the edges of his body waver as in a mirage. I watched him the way the holidaymakers watched the sea: pruriently, letting my face slacken. Perhaps the earth had been compacted by the diggers because sometimes he had to bring the maul down on a peg several times before the soil gave up and let it in. There was, I thought, something humiliating about the business of hitting in pegs, something about the way the pegs just stood there, waiting to be hit in. Or how the man with the maul said, Stand still so I can hit you when he hit a peg at a bad angle and it shied away from him.
Above me the sun flickered through the clouds as though its filament was about to wear out. I left the solarium and entered the living room, causing my old Bechstein to rock and let out its confused imploring sound. The piano, I had always thought, was the simpleton of the musical world, sounding off at the slightest provocation. Not like the oboe or clarinet, which strained just to produce a note. Nevertheless, I sat down and opened a score by some dull composer, Czerny probably, and started playing. The piano had developed an echo on the high notes which lingered in the air, and I hadn’t played for so long that my fingers felt arthritic, moving along the keys in a stiff and lifeless way, an impression heightened by my wrist, which hovered so awkwardly over the keys that it seemed to me the broken bones must have been fused back together at an incorrect angle. It was cold. I stopped playing to adjust the radiator then sat down again. Several times I stood up to fetch a blanket or adjust the piano stool or straighten the leg of my pyjama trousers (which always bunched awkwardly beneath me), then sat down again only to find myself standing up a moment later to make some or other minor shift in my environment. This compulsive getting-up-and-sitting-down continued for some time until, unable to make myself comfortable, I closed the lid and went back to the solarium. The men in yellow vests were still snaking their way up and down the site with their pegs. They worked together. When a row of pegs had been knocked in, the man with the maul came along with a ball of green twine which he attached to the tops of the pegs to create a long green line. First they rationalised the site into a series of green lines. Then, beginning from a northerly direction, they created a series of perpendicular green lines which crossed the original lines at right angles. It became apparent, as the process of unravelling the twine advanced, that they were dividing the site into a grid. The coordinates, I imagined, for some as yet non-existent underground activity – the gas lines, perhaps, or the sewage system.
Later in the afternoon, as the sun was dropping behind the mountain, I returned to the piano, angled the task light down, covered my legs with the blanket and tried again. In the dusky light the notes wavered on the stave. My playing was accompanied by the regular beat of the builders hitting in pegs, though from inside the house the sound was distant and detached, and more defeated somehow. When I stopped to listen to it, it seemed to me that what I heard was not a thud so much as a low ticking sound, as if the old wooden metronome that had accompanied my boyhood practice sessions had returned now to restrain me from getting carried away. The memory of those long and lonely afternoons spent holed up in a practice room with that implacable tick made my heart strain. It isn’t natural to be shut up like that with just a piano for company, Hannah Kallenbach said. To pass the time I’d tape a sheet of paper over the door window and masturbate, so that to this day the act of masturbation and metronomes are indelibly connected in my mind. It takes its toll on someone, said Hannah Kallenbach, to be alone like that for hours, months, years … It makes sense that a person who has spent so much time alone in a room, over time, would come to believe that a room could give him nothing but solitude.
It took all afternoon for the grid to be fully realised and at the end of the day Touw arrived. He stood to one side, leaning against the fence with his arms crossed. The site looked like it had been covered by a mesh or a loose green weave. He drank a can of something
and smashed his boot against a block of paving with an expression of deep concentration. After a few minutes of doing this he crouched down and exclaimed, Here, I can feel it. I feel the pull of the paranormal. There’s a river here, he called to the workmen. What should we do with it? Suddenly I brushed up against a forgotten dream. There was a pause between recalling the existence of the dream and recovering its contents. The dream concerned Hannah Kallenbach, though it was not Hannah Kallenbach herself who formed the subject of the dream so much as the room at the back of her house. I’d dreamt I was walking towards the yellow room along a corridor, only the corridor, with a dreamlike disrespect for proportion, had grown so long (like the corridors in the Houses of Parliament with countless doors opening off either side) that I knew I would never reach it. There seemed, in fact, to be a number of interconnected dreams about the yellow room, or rather its absence. In one dream I reached the door only to find the wood so swollen and the handle so stiff that it wouldn’t open. In another I forced the door open only to find the room behind it completely unrecognisable, its walls clad in oppressive wood panels and lined with fax machines and TVs all tuned in to different channels, like some kind of broadcasting station.
Outside, someone shouted and a car door closed with a deep thud. The chain on the gate rattled as the builders locked up to go home. I sat down on the chaise. The temperature was dropping – it was colder than it had been at one o’clock or two o’clock – and the radiator just hummed and whined and issued a damp stream of air into the room. The coldness tired me. Although perhaps it wasn’t the coldness that tired me so much as the house, since there is an idea that a house should afford some protection from the weather, yet to me being in the house seemed no different from being out in the world. If you want to sleep, Hannah Kallenbach’s voice said, why then do you not sleep? I walked to the window instead and stood there with my hands clenched. An icy breeze came and went along the skin of my leg as though through a tear in my pyjama trousers. What is there for me to do but go to bed? I thought. After all, I had no job, no wife, no child to take care of. Nothing, said Hannah Kallenbach. Absolutely nothing.
All the while, the worm of cold air disappeared and reappeared on my skin, sending my hand chasing after it in some complicated kind of foreplay. Having felt with one hand along the seam of my pyjama trousers, searching for a hole, I now ran my hand along the window’s edge. The sea air corroded things – it had eaten away taps and wires, pipes and light fittings – so perhaps a gap somewhere was letting in cold air. The paint flaked as I touched it. Where are you? I said to the hole. Where are you, if anywhere at all? Because the window appeared to have no metal frame, merging seamlessly into the concrete around it.
But then, beneath the left-hand corner of the glass, I felt an almost indiscernible groove in the concrete. Like the dink in the head of a very small screw. Was it a screw? It looked like a screw head but it was hard to see because it was covered over with paint. Why don’t you just unscrew it and see what happens? Hannah Kallenbach said. So I fetched a carving knife from the kitchen. The screw was stiff, so firmly sealed over with paint that it bent back the top of the knife. But, beneath another knife, it gave way. It brought me great pleasure to be doing something, to be using my hands again, and I lifted the screw from the wall until it came out completely, leaving a dark tunnel in its wake. Through the tunnel came a jet of cool air. It occurred to me that since a screw is always attached to something, unscrewing it must be severing something from something else, but the activity was so completely engaging that I couldn’t stop going over the window with my hands for more screws, and having found them (there were half a dozen or so spaced at regular intervals) unscrewing them. At the end of the row I pressed my hand against the glass, expecting it to collapse in a heap, but it didn’t. It must, I thought, have been held in place by some hidden mechanism, or limescale perhaps. In the failing light the window had become a mirror in which I saw a composition of stripes: the crumpled brown stripes of my pyjamas against the black stripe of the piano against the white stripe of the ceiling from which two strips of wire protruded from the remains of a broken light fitting.
That night I felt so lonely that I couldn’t sleep. I soothed myself by imagining I was a child again, at a time in one’s life when sleeping alone is not yet lonely. When eventually I drifted off I dreamt of Hannah Kallenbach’s yellow room again. But this time when I opened the door at the far end of the corridor, the room I arrived in was not the yellow room but the bedroom I’d slept in as a child, only the things inside it weren’t my childhood things but adult things, official-looking papers and books, ceramic pots, a pair of thick-soled sandals. Whereas the other dreams had been vignettes – at least it seemed that way to me, since I remembered only fragments – this particular dream stuck in my mind because it was long and exquisitely detailed. I was sitting on the bed in this room that was either the yellow room or my childhood bedroom or both, when someone knocked on the door. As the door opened I made out the face of Hannah Kallenbach. She stood for a moment, silhouetted in the crack of the doorway. She looked nice, standing there. In the subdued dream light her wrinkles softened. Then she smiled at me with genuine pleasure and said, What are you doing? and all at once, from behind her, water came rushing in, swirling around her feet in little eddies. What have you done? she was saying now, her voice louder. I saw that she was wearing a coat and some kind of hat. I’m sorry, I said. I’m sorry. Because I remembered that I’d been running a bath upstairs but once the tap had been opened I couldn’t get it shut. Hannah Kallenbach was walking towards me with eyes narrowed and her arms crossed so hard over her chest that her breasts were flat. I didn’t know what was going to happen but whatever it was aroused a feeling in me that wasn’t sexual exactly, but since it was everywhere in my body, I felt it there too. When she reached the bed Hannah Kallenbach leant down and pulled me towards her. What are you doing? I said. And she said, I love you. But I knew I was dreaming. So I said, I don’t believe you. Tell me again in the morning.
Chapter 7
Whatever you love
most dearly
We’d been warned of high winds and now they arrived, starting with a coordinated movement of leaves in the trees and a slapping of branches on the windows. The wind flew through the house, blowing curtains, rattling door handles, skewing pictures, causing the telephone – which hadn’t rung for weeks – to tremble in its cradle. It pushed at the living-room window, which shook and shuddered and then, with one great gust, came out completely.
Blow, blow, blow, said Hannah Kallenbach, whose voice had become the dark background of my days. Avoiding the broken glass, I crossed the room. The empty window made me feel vulnerable in a way that was not entirely unpleasant. How can I explain it? Through it the tall Gothic spires of the church in the bay looked more exotic somehow. The absence of glass produced a sort of heightened receptivity in me. It made me more susceptible to the world, letting me receive its imprint directly onto myself, like a photographic negative. Through the glassless window, the purple sunrise with its dishevelled horizon seemed grander, and more powerful. Everything was exactly the same as it always had been, of course it was, but there was something vague about the way my eyes registered the world. Whereas previously I could see things clearly – the trees, even their individual leaves – now when I looked out the low-flying gulls were almost indistinguishable from the white specks that came off the tops of the waves. Things were on the cusp of not being themselves. I had the idea that it wasn’t my vision deteriorating but the very glue which held the objects of the world together growing old and weak.
When the wind picked up, it moved things, and when it withdrew, everything went still. It blurred the distinction between what was alive and what was not dead exactly, but … Well, between what had life and what didn’t. That was the problem. Or rather, what enlivens things? Does it come from inside or outside? The wind blew thoughts into my head: wild, inappropriate, dreamlike thoughts. When my eyes landed on
the row of agapanthus under the house, the plants gazing up at me with their big heads from the flowerbed looked animate. I didn’t see plants staring up at me but sentient beings whose tall stalks, depending on their uprightness or the angle of their heads, had a certain humanness. And although I knew that it was sad to attribute to flowers a character they didn’t possess, that it was sad to find an animus in plants when all a plant is capable of is processing light, I couldn’t help feeling that the tall flower nodding on its stalk was strong yet somehow benevolent, while the skew bloom beside it rising from its leafy body had an affect that was at once quizzical and superior.
Next door, the builders had arrived and were moving around the site tidying things, motioning for each other to come and see this or that bit of damage. Tarpaulins and sheets of chipboard were scattered around the site, not messily so much as in the positions that things might adopt over time to make themselves more comfortable. The tower itself, which by now was well underway, seemed undamaged by the various weathers. The gas lines, which men with picks and shovels had laid the previous week, were intact. So too were the sewers and the foundations. Only the mesh fence between the house and site had collapsed, a fence post ripped right out of the ground with earth still clinging to its foundations. Touw, who’d arrived in his usual orange handyman trousers, was standing at the fallen-down fence with one foot resting on the fence post.
OK, Mr Field Page 5
