OK, Mr Field

by Katharine Kilalea

  Sometimes during a power cut the lights would come on in the middle of the night with a surge then go off again. And in the moments before my eyes had adjusted to the dark, when it was hard for things to preserve their shape, I’d see my dressing gown hanging beside the bed and imagine Hannah Kallenbach standing beside me. Are you OK, Mr Field? she’d say. And when I opened my mouth it was that small child’s voice that replied, Fuck you, meaning Fuck you for haunting me in this way. Fuck me? she’d say. Sometimes instead of Hannah Kallenbach it would be Touw standing over me, asking, What have you done? Where the hell is my tower? with his voice hoarse from shouting. And sometimes in the middle of the night it would be the dog who had climbed into bed with me, and my body, feeling its wet nose sniffing around for a bit of sweaty crotch, would tense up – first the muscles in my calves would tighten, then my knees would begin to stiffen and there would be a sort of trembling in my legs as though tired out from heavy carrying. Even the sluglike movements of my intestines would go rigid and my spongy lungs, like sails filled with wind, seemed straining to burst. And at those times, that ‘turned-on’ feeling lower down that so outraged me when awake was allowed to progress without resistance to its inevitable conclusion, though at the point where the climax was meant to be – because there was no reason for excitement maybe – the feeling would always turn back on itself, leaving me with a nothing sort of feeling, and I’d wake up moaning, Nooo, but it was just the sound of my stomach grumbling.

  One morning a little bird was stationed on the branch outside the window, cheeping loudly, as if relieved to be reunited with me after the separation of sleep. The air through the window was thick, almost impenetrable, so it took me a while to notice a second bird standing beside the first one, because it was standing very still on the branch – not preening itself or sunning itself like cold-blooded creatures do, just standing there, quite still, so that it looked almost like part of the tree, like a small grey fruit. Even when, from time to time, the bird twitched or shuddered and buried its head in its feathers, it was almost indistinguishable from the leaves. After a while, thinking me dead or inanimate perhaps, the second bird hopped towards me in a series of jerky movements. Reaching the window, it stopped and looked at me with its dead black eyes. It was making a noise without moving its beak and though I couldn’t understand what it was saying I knew that it was communicating, that it was actually saying something and not just making senseless noises. What’s the matter with him? the bird seemed to be saying. Is he in anguish? No, said the other bird. It’s agony, actually.

  Has he been tortured in some way?

  I think he’s a part of the unhappiness that’s come apart from the total mass of unhappiness.

  Chapter 13

  Causa Sine Qua Non

  Of course, it happened long ago, but there is an evening I think of all the time. Here it is. The day was nearly over. When I got into the car the sky was so welled-up with colour – orange, yellow, blue, green – that it made me want to vomit. I watched the house disappear in the rear-view mirror, its square body and spindly limbs subsumed almost immediately by the mist. It was hard to look at the road beneath me because the mist drew everything into itself: no more trees, no more houses, one minute the street you’re driving on is there, the next you’re unsupported.

  All day I’d watched it, the fog rolling in. The sight of it was extraordinary, this vast cloud advancing from the ocean. The air was thick and heavy. It drifted in on some current or wind until it came to the edge of the mountain where it stopped and waited, accumulating, hanging over the world like a new law. The trees were pale, so dull you could hardly tell they were there. Houses had their shutters closed against the weather so that it looked as if they were covering their faces with their hands. What are they ashamed of? I was thinking. What are they afraid of? The trees lining the road were divided into intensities of grey – those nearest were pale, past a certain point everything lost colour. The landscape was dry and arid, as though so destroyed by the cold or the salty air as to no longer be able to bear vegetation. All around were differentiated shades of grey: grey streets, grey houses, fog, trees growing clouds instead of leaves.

  Inland, the mist was thinner. I stood for a while at Hannah Kallenbach’s fence before climbing in and crawling along the path I’d worn through the bushes. It was dark outside and inside the yellow room it was dark. In the seconds or milliseconds before the light came on, the room was so dark that there was nothing to pin my eye onto. I didn’t know the room was occupied until the door opened. I was worried about you, said Hannah Kallenbach. I wasn’t expecting you tonight.

  Well, said the man, here I am. He was holding his body differently, speaking differently, his voice strangely caught. Then there was a silence and I wasn’t sure if and when he would start talking. But then, having prefaced it with I’m no good at storytelling, you know, he sat down and started to tell a long, involved story about a writer, or maybe a rider, it was hard to say because of the way certain sounds came through the window clearly while others were suppressed.

  The story was, as it happened, a story I’d heard before, anecdotally, to illustrate the legal problem of assigning culpability in a complicated sequence of events. As you know, the man began, there’s a fog outside. It’s foggy. Quite foggy. Foggier anyway than it was yesterday and the day before that also. The radio said to stay in, he went on, but, fog notwithstanding, I took the tarpaulin off the car. I wanted to go out so it was necessary to drive through the fog. Anyway, he went on, the Met Office was saying on the radio that drivers should take care where visibility was reduced to less than ten metres, which was everywhere. Flights and trains had been cancelled, they said. And every minute the veil was getting heavier. It was like being lost in an atmosphere of memories. I couldn’t feel the tips of my fingers; my hands were lost in cloud. When I looked down, I couldn’t see what shoes I was wearing. On the road, objects disappeared, apart from the aerials of the houses, which for some reason stood out clearly against the sky.

  Every inch and every metre, every block and every street corner, in every conceivable direction as far as the eye could see, had been whited out. I was, as they say, enveloped in this thick layer of cloud. I was in a daze. I kept thinking it was me, that the reason I couldn’t see anything was because I wasn’t looking hard enough. I had the idea that the vagueness in my head had entered my body. You know how it is to stand up too quickly and see your eyes covered for a moment by a film of blank? She didn’t answer. Well that’s how it felt. Only sometimes things disappeared and reappeared, and sometimes they disappeared completely.

  The tree beside me knocked its branches lightly on the windowpane as if asking to go in, its yellow speckled leaves made a sighing sound as they moved, and the man’s subdued voice gave way to silence. The silence made me nervous because I didn’t know what it was saying. Because it wasn’t the kind of silence that is deep and empty, it was the kind that is full and alive. Well, said Hannah Kallenbach, what happened then? I just kept on driving, the man said. There wasn’t much traffic so I went slowly, trusting that whatever was ahead of me would become clearer the nearer I got to it. It felt dangerous to be driving, but the fog pulled me into itself and I surrendered to it because the air quality was entertaining – telling stories about temperature, meteorological conditions, these kinds of things.

  Then, some way from home, along the highway, I saw something: a shape, a vague outline. Dimly, only very dimly. Then it disappeared. Well, that’s how it seemed to me, he said, although of course a thing that actually exists can’t just vanish into thin air. It was a big black animal-type thing, the man said, maybe a horse but maybe not. Unlikely to be a horse, I thought, because what kind of horse rides on a highway? But the air was full of uncertainty. All that was certain was that I had no idea if or when or where I would find something. And then, indicating that he had reached the heart of the story, the man stood up. I could see from his shadow that he was walking to and fro in the single-windowed ro
om. I turned off somewhere, he said. I’m not sure where exactly but it must have been the mountain road. I couldn’t see the road itself, and as I drove higher – because of wind speed or direction – the air was getting murkier. And I must have forgotten to change gear because at some point the car stalled and when I restarted it in first, the incline was too steep and it couldn’t manage. So I pulled up the handbrake and stopped. The road was empty. It was as though the mist had eaten up the other cars, like some kind of acid or a devouring white gas. Twice I tried to start the car but it just rolled backwards, so then I turned it off and didn’t try again. It looked as though the landscape was breathing and because I couldn’t really breathe, I had the feeling it was sucking the breath out of me. I felt tired and pleasant thoughts floated into my mind.

  It sounds frightening, Hannah Kallenbach said. And dangerous, to be stopped like that, broken down in the middle of the road. You might have started a pile-up.

  But what could I do about it? the man said. Nothing. It was a breakdown. There was nothing to be done about it. I just sat there, waiting. And after a while, when I looked up, something opened in the sky. It was drizzling slightly, a sunlit drizzle. The late-winter flowers beside the road were like bits of snow. The trees which had been Pompeii-like, as if covered in ash, were being released from their shroud, regaining colour. The afternoon sun, softened by the thin layer of cloud, cast everything in a luminous light. It was beautiful, he said, a kind of miracle.

  Anyway, he said, as the cloud burned off, ahead of me, not too far away, trotting to one side of the road, I saw the horse again. It was definitely a horse because this time I could see the rider’s figure rising and lowering above it in jagged counterpoint to the trot. And the funny thing is, he said, the horse seemed to be watching me. It seemed, all the while, as it was riding, for some reason to be turning its head around to get a look at me, staring at me with its big black eyes as if it was trying to tell me some secret, as if it was using its eyes to communicate some message, like a prisoner under surveillance, like maybe that it was being pulled along by the rider in a direction it didn’t want to go in. Only the horse was turning towards me so urgently and so frequently that, as happens when you’re not watching where you’re going, it began veering off course, stumbling at first into the roadside ditch, and then, panicked, trying to right itself, turning back, but too sharply, crossing over the yellow line on the side of the road, perpendicular to the direction of traffic, leaning its neck forward and accelerating into a canter.

  I had a vision of somebody – me, I suppose – crashing into it. And I was so caught up with worry, the man was saying, that I didn’t see that another car actually was coming until, having swerved to avoid colliding with me, it overtook me and headed directly for the horse.

  Oh, how awful, said Hannah Kallenbach. Oh no.

  At the last minute, the man said, the horse lifted its legs and jumped as if to clear the roof of the car. I crouched over the steering wheel – a sympathetic reflex, I guess – then sat up again. The rider was sitting a few feet in front of me on the road, breathing heavily into the cold air. There was no blood on his face, which I was grateful for, just a bit of brown stubble and an expression that was almost bemused. Perhaps it was gratitude.

  Thank goodness, said Hannah Kallenbach. It’s amazing how many people get hit by cars without dying.

  Cars stopped and an ambulance appeared from nowhere, the man said. I couldn’t see it but I knew it was there because there were blue freckles of dirt appearing and disappearing on the windscreen. Somebody covered the rider with a blanket. He had propped himself up on his elbow. I looked around for the horse, which I found lying across the road on its back. The car which had hit the horse – it was some kind of Volvo – had shorn off all its legs below the knee, so that the horse was swaying from side to side on its back, not understanding why it couldn’t get up, not knowing why it was rolling around like a fruit, never able to get enough momentum to turn itself upright. A small crowd had gathered around the horse, which had turned again to look for me, and having found me was staring at me through the gathering of legs. I could see from its expression that the horse was thinking, that it was thinking of someone, because it had the look of a creature who is not alone but has someone to think about. Then it closed its eyes.

  To die? asked Hannah Kallenbach.

  No, the man said, just to think. A police car had arrived and a woman was asking the policeman to put the horse out of its misery but the policeman said he couldn’t shoot animals. She asked the paramedic to give the horse a shot of something to kill it but of course the paramedic couldn’t give medicine to animals either. Well, was there a vet, then? she wanted to know, which there wasn’t.

  Of course not, said Hannah Kallenbach.

  The upward inflection of Hannah Kallenbach’s Mmm meant, And what happened then? But the man said, Nothing happened. The bystanders were dispersing. It was clear to everybody, I suppose, that the drama was over, that there was no more excitement. The rider just sat there drinking a glass of water and the horse just lay there swinging its torso from side to side over the ridge of its spine, trying to get up. Its lips were pulled up over its gums and from time to time it made a sound that, if it were human, I’d have called a sigh. The rider’s face was white because when he’d heard what had happened to the horse he’d thrown up.

  What a story, said Hannah Kallenbach.

  But the story wasn’t over. There was something odd about him, the man went on. He was odd-looking. One thing that was odd about him was that he wore the same shoes as me! I’d noticed it earlier, but it was only now that I noticed his black trousers, which, though they were slightly darker and looser around his legs, were also the same as mine. As, when I took in his whole outfit, was his dark-green jumper with buttons on the sleeves. And his short brown tweed coat with big lapels, into whose pockets he reached his hand and withdrew, nestled together in a neat cream ball, a slightly less dirty and frayed, but unmistakably the same, pair of woollen gloves that I’d brought back from a trip to India. Several times, as he sat there, he buried his gloves in his pocket and retrieved them. Anyhow, a barricade had been set up by then and the police were trying to clear traffic. Keep moving, said the policeman who came up to my window. So I started the car and after a few goes managed to get going. I remember that the rider, as I passed him, was sitting with his neck at an odd angle, visualising the rest of the horse perhaps, because his eyes kept flickering off in the direction of the legs. If he spent too long sitting like that, I thought, his neck would get stiff. But perhaps he had whiplash. Who knows? For a moment our eyes met and although he’d put on a grimace, I had the idea that his mouth wasn’t expressing anguish or pain, that he’d pulled his lips that way to hide something, a smile maybe, the way a person might cough to cover up a laugh. I looked at the rider hard as I passed, the man said, marking the differences between us. His hair was brown, like mine, but shorter. If his well-kempt appearance was anything to go by, he had money. And although his clothes were different from mine – newer, straighter, better-fitting – what was so painfully different about us, given that we were essentially the same, was that he was much more handsome than me. That’s why I kept my head down as I drove past, protecting him, I suppose, since he’d not have been pleased by the resemblance.

  Now, through the gap, I saw Hannah Kallenbach’s hand move towards the man and perhaps she touched him somewhere on his body in a way that surprised him because his foot flinched. What are you doing? he said. The hand was suspended for a moment in the gap before it was retracted, and in that time I thought how beautiful it was, that her hand showed its affection beautifully.

  Are you OK? she said.

  I don’t know, he said. Do I look OK?

  As I drove back into False Bay, a fog lay over the water. Above me, the square white house and the tower behind it seemed, well, not similar exactly but connected somehow, or belonging together, sprouting beside each other on the mountain as if grown
from the same organic source. I manoeuvred my way along the bends of the coastal road in a state of total exhaustion, listlessness on an unprecedented scale, tiredness to an unprecedented depth. What was wrong with me? How could I explain the nature of my problem when I was such a stranger to myself? How could I possibly grasp what was going on inside me when the inside of my body was hidden from me, walled in by my skin? When it was impossible to feel my organs in the way I could my limbs? As I parked at the bottom of Jacob’s Ladder and looked up at the tower, which sat on its podium and looked down at me, I felt profoundly wrong – though whether it was my inner mysteriousness which felt wrong, or the feeling that something was mysteriously wrong inside me, was hard to say. Think, I told myself. Think. And then, looking at the tower, I started thinking. I thought things unrelated to the tower, thoughts about myself. Because suddenly, not in words but in shapes, the tower revealed something to me. It was as if, slowly but clearly, its stacked-up floors, punctured by its central cavity, expressed something of my own situation, as if it had turned my eyes inwards or given my skin a measure of transparency, so that by looking at it, all at once, I could picture my own interior in a way I’d not been able to picture it before. And what I saw, with a sudden vertiginous knowledge, was that what occupied me was not, as I’d thought for all these years, some solid alien presence – like a tumour deep inside, pushing my organs to one side – but a hole. Not a lack, though. Because the feeling of something missing in me, that I was missing something, didn’t cause me shame or regret. It was a rich feeling. There was a pleasure to be taken in the idea of a body, like a woman’s body, with a space in it, a space in which things could be put.