by Sam Byers
‘Hello?’
‘Oh,’ said Robert. ‘Hello?’
‘Who’s there?’
‘I’m … My name’s Robert. I’m doing some research in the area and—’
‘What sort of research?’
‘Just … research.’
‘If you’ve come from them, you can keep walking. One of your lot’s already been round.’
‘What lot?’
‘Downton lot.’
‘I’m not from … Did you say someone’s been round?’
‘What’s it to you?’
‘I was just interested to know if someone else has been round, that’s all.’
‘Never you mind who’s been round.’
‘OK. Look, I’m sorry I bothered you. I’ll—’
‘Hang on.’
Robert paused, expecting the door to open. Nothing happened.
‘Hello?’ said the voice again.
‘Hello,’ said Robert. ‘I … Did you tell me to hang on?’
‘Yeah.’
‘OK …’ There was another pause. ‘Er, hang on for what?’
‘I can’t get up.’
‘What?’
‘I can’t get up. I need a hand.’
‘Are you hurt?’
‘No. He moved my sodding stick and now I can’t get up.’
Robert tried the door.
‘It’s locked,’ he said.
‘I know it’s fucking locked, for fuck’s sake.’
‘Then how am I supposed to help?’
‘The window.’
Robert moved over to the filthy, forbidding window and ran his fingers gingerly round the frame.
‘There’s no way in,’ he said.
‘Going to have to break it then, aren’t you?’
‘You want me to break your window?’
‘What are you, daft or something?’
‘I’m just saying there must be another way. Hasn’t someone else got a key? What about the fire brigade? I could call them and ask them to—’
‘Don’t call anyone,’ the voice said urgently. Then, more softly: ‘Please. Please don’t call anyone. I don’t want anyone to know.’
‘Alright,’ Robert said. ‘Don’t worry, OK? I’m going to help you, so just … You’re going to be fine. Alright?’
‘Thank you.’
Even as Robert began looking around for something suitably solid and weighty, a perturbing thought was beginning to tickle at the fringes of his mind. His feelings, he noted, were in a state of oscillation: concern on the one hand, but on the other, uncomfortably, excitement.
Outside a neighbouring flat, a small collection of broken furniture lay piled. Picking up a stool, Robert prised off the leg and, after a few trial strikes, used it to break the window.
To say the smell that poured forth was a single smell would have been a gross oversimplification. It was a conglomeration of overlapping, intertwining olfactory experiences. The top note was fag smoke, but under the tar there was something far worse, far more complicated and human. Urine was involved, that was for certain, and also a very specific kind of sweat. Then there was everything Robert could see in the kitchen now that he was peering in: mouldering food, past-it milk, a fermenting, overflowing bin.
Across the dingy living room, through a lingering cloud of smoke, Robert spotted the man he’d been speaking to. He was sitting on one of two sofas, looking across the flat, through the small, open-plan kitchen area, to the window. He was, Robert thought, quite extraordinarily thin. His beard was rough and grey, the moustache stained yellow in one corner. When he smiled a rather off-putting smile, Robert could see that the man’s teeth were almost brown.
‘I’m Robert.’
‘Darkin.’
‘Darkin?’
‘My last name. It’s what people call me.’
‘Right.’
‘Well, come on then. Hop in that window.’
Robert pulled the window open as far as he could, took a deep breath, held it, and climbed up onto the window ledge. Beneath the window the sink was full of washing-up. Clambering over that, he ended up on the edge of the counter and was able to jump down.
‘My stick’s in the corner by the door.’
Now that he was inside the flat, surveying the faded carpet and sagging sofa, the near-impenetrable ash cloud and the remains of what appeared to be nothing but sandwiches on the kitchen counter, it struck Robert that it was entirely possible Darkin had never left it, or not for a long time anyway. The place had that over-lived-in feel, a fleshy sense of its own microsystemic life. Everything in here, Robert thought, was positively teeming, but somehow, at the heart of it, was death, creeping in, going about its business.
He saw a walking stick propped by the door, picked it up, and walked over and handed it to Darkin, who neither thanked him nor made any move to stand. Robert felt, without really being able to say why, that he was not expected to leave just yet.
‘Can I, er … get you anything?’ he said.
‘Might as well get the kettle on, eh?’ said Darkin, lighting up a fag. ‘You don’t mind if I smoke.’
‘Well …’
‘Wasn’t asking.’
‘Right.’
‘The other bloke made a fuss about it. Now I’m all out of whack.’
‘What other bloke?’
‘The bloke before you. Said it was his place of work.’
‘Is he the one who moved your stick?’
‘That’s the one.’
‘Why did he do that?’
‘Because he’s a cunt.’
‘Was he from Downton?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And what did he want?’
‘To tell me I’m vulnerable.’
‘And then he moved your stick.’
‘Yup.’
‘Deliberately.’
‘Yup.’
‘And you told him you couldn’t stand up without it?’
‘Not exactly, but he knew.’
Robert turned towards the kitchen and sought out the kettle. He tried to clear some of the limescale by swilling it under the tap a few times but it was a losing battle.
‘Where are your teabags?’ he called over his shoulder.
‘Cupboard above you.’
Darkin’s cigarette was not merely generating smoke of its own but somehow reanimating the dormant smoke of fags gone by. Robert found the teabags alongside half a loaf of bread and a jar of jam whose label was so faded and sticky he could no longer make out the brand.
‘When was the last time you went shopping?’
‘Bloke goes for me.’
There were two mugs in the sink. Gingerly, Robert lifted them out of the carnage by their handles and ran them under the hot tap. There was no sign of a sponge or a cloth so, with some reluctance, he squirted washing-up liquid onto his fingers and swished them around the inside of the mugs before rinsing a teaspoon he found lying on the side.
‘Lived here long?’ he said.
‘Long enough.’
‘Always on your own?’
‘Not always, no.’
‘Wife?’
‘Dead.’
‘Sorry.’
Robert watched the kettle boil, testing words and phrases in his mind. Infirm old widower … harassed and intimidated …
‘You like it here?’
‘Not really. No sense moving now though.’
‘But you must have liked it when you moved here.’
‘It was alright then.’
‘It’s changed a lot.’
Darkin nodded.
‘You probably remember when all of this was fields, right?’
Darkin shot him a look. Robert moved on swiftly.
‘Sugar?’
‘Three.’
That plus the fags explained the teeth, Robert thought. He found a bag of sugar on the side, its contents clumped and browned like cat litter, and dumped the requisite number of teaspoons in Darkin’s cup, already on the lookout for an opport
unity to dispose of his own tea without appearing rude. He carried the two mugs over and set them down on the coffee table before perching himself on the sofa opposite Darkin. As the cushions took his weight, they exhaled their grimy history with a wheezing sigh. Robert was already building his piece in his mind. He would, he thought, punctuate it with sparse but tragic detail: the out-of-reach stick; the overflowing ashtray; the fact that Darkin’s jumper, now that Robert looked closely, was on inside out.
‘No-one gives a shit about people like me,’ said Darkin finally. ‘That’s the truth. We worked. We paid our taxes.’ He took an exploratory sip of his tea. ‘Like bloody dishwater.’
‘When you say we …’ said Robert, subtly recoiling from that casual first-person plural.
‘But that’s not what gets you ahead, is it?’ said Darkin, pointedly ignoring the question.
‘What isn’t?’
‘Working hard. Looking out for yourself. Not asking for anything. Doesn’t make a difference if your face doesn’t fit.’
‘Doesn’t fit where?’
Darkin leaned forward and looked right down the barrel of Robert’s gaze in a manner that quickly caused Robert to discover much of interest in the contents of his tea.
‘My face … doesn’t … fit,’ said Darkin, jabbing the air with his fag-bearing index and middle fingers for emphasis. ‘Try and tell me different.’
He sank back against the sofa cushions. ‘Don’t give me that look,’ he said.
‘What look?’
‘That judgemental look.’
Robert held up his hands in what he hoped was the perfect picture of innocence. ‘No judgement here.’
‘Pull the other one,’ said Darkin. ‘You think I don’t know that look? Well, here’s news for you: I don’t give a shit.’
‘About what?’
‘About what you think.’
‘Right,’ said Robert, who found the idea of someone not caring what he thought strangely offensive. ‘Fine. I’m not asking you to.’
‘Then stop looking at me like that.’
‘I’m just … What do you mean your face doesn’t fit? Do you mean—’
‘Let me ask you a question,’ said Darkin.
‘OK.’
‘Equality …’ said Darkin.
Something in Robert’s face must have shifted in a way he was unable to mask, because Darkin’s shifted in turn.
‘Yeah,’ said Darkin. ‘See? And you don’t even know what I’m going to ask yet.’
‘What?’ said Robert. ‘I’m listening.’
‘Equality,’ said Darkin. ‘Good thing or a bad thing?’
‘I …’ Robert faltered, reluctant for some reason to offer a response that might risk Darkin’s disapproval.
‘Good thing?’ he said tentatively.
‘Are you asking or telling?’ said Darkin. ‘It’s a simple question.’
‘Good thing,’ said Robert. ‘Obviously.’
‘Obviously?’
‘Well … Yeah. Equality, right? It’s a good thing.’
‘How much equality?’ said Darkin.
‘What?’
‘How much equality?’
‘Well, until everything is equal, I suppose. That’s kind of the point of—’
‘Equal? Or more than equal?’
‘Isn’t more than equal the same as, you know, not equal?’
‘Say you go for a job, right?’
‘Right.’
‘And you’re qualified for that job.’
‘OK.’
‘Do you think they’ll give it to someone like you?’
‘I’d like to think so.’
‘Then you’re living in a fantasy land.’
‘Why?’
‘Because they can’t give it to you, can they?’
‘Because …’
‘Because they’ve got to give it to a foreigner. Quotas, isn’t it?’
‘Well, I don’t think—’
‘Look around here,’ said Darkin.
‘OK.’
‘These used to be for local people. How many local people you think live here now?’
‘Well, hardly anyone lives here now.’
‘But who do you think is going to live here?’
‘Rich people,’ said Robert. ‘That’s the point. They’re decanting—’
‘Decanting shit. They’re making room.’
‘Making room for—’
‘For all the foreigners.’
‘What foreigners?’
‘What foreigners. Listen to you. You know how many foreigners come to this country every year?’
‘About—’
‘Too many, that’s how many. And they’ve got to live somewhere, haven’t they? And because of all this bloody equality, instead of just telling them to go away, we say, yeah, sure, come and live here. We’ll give you a house, we’ll give you benefits. We’ll let you move your bloody family over here so you can all talk foreign to each other.’
‘But there’s no—’
‘The cities are full,’ said Darkin. ‘Been going on for years. Read the papers. Where do you think they’re going to go now? Got to go somewhere.’
‘But if you look at the statistics …’
‘Lies,’ said Darkin. ‘All lies. You can’t trust statistics. Who do you think makes all the statistics in the first place?’ He shook his head. ‘You want to get something out of this country? Change your colour.’
There followed an uncomfortable silence.
‘Not that I’ve got anything against them personally,’ said Darkin.
‘Of course not,’ said Robert.
‘I’ve met some nice ones.’
‘Absolutely.’
Distractedly, Robert picked up his tea and drank from it, only to remember the condition in which he’d found the cup. Hastily, surreptitiously, he returned the cup to the table, a bitter, possibly imagined aftertaste arising at the back of his throat. He sucked on his gums, working up his saliva, hoping to wash away or dilute whatever it was he’d just inadvertently consumed.
*
A strange and uncomfortable side effect of haranguing your partner in secret, Jess had found, was the extent to which you were guiltily sweet to them in person. Before the arrival of Julia Benjamin, the scent of something stagnant had hung around their lives. Now, they were refreshed. At pains to conceal what she did during the day, Jess slipped into a different skin in the evening – a skin Robert, to Jess’s increasing discomfort, seemed to like.
‘Hey hon,’ she said, breezing into the kitchen where Robert was cooking and depositing her laptop bag on a dining chair.
This was another new phenomenon: these moments when she lost the ability to say his name, and so leaned on a term of endearment in order to address him.
‘Hey,’ he said, turning and smiling. He was at the cooker, something deeply red and strongly spiced simmering on the stovetop in front of him. From the tinny portable speaker on the worktop, a self-consciously relaxed American male droned his way through a podcast.
She leaned in to kiss him. He tasted of chilli and tomato. Her lips came away tingling.
‘What’s this?’ she said, reaching past him and stirring what was in the pot.
‘An experiment,’ he said. ‘Constructed entirely out of what was to hand. You want some wine?’
She sat down at the dining table and rested her feet on a chair.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Half a glass.’
‘Staying sharp for the big event?’
‘Something like that.’
He put half a glass of red in front of her and then topped up his own from the bottle.
‘Any idea what you’re expecting?’
She shook her head, shrugged. ‘Who knows? Could be anything. Could be bullshit.’
‘What does Deepa think?’
Deepa, in Robert’s pronunciation, was always italicised. He didn’t like her, probably because he was aware she didn’t like him. Out of a sense of decorum, though, he�
�d been able to distil his feelings into the simple pointed utterance of her name, thereby avoiding any protracted disagreement. It annoyed Jess, but she accepted the compromise. Sometimes it even amused her.
‘Deepa thinks it’s probably bullshit.’
‘Is there anything she doesn’t think is bullshit?’
‘She’s open to persuasion in terms of things being bullshit or not bullshit, but nine times out of ten she decides they’re bullshit. To be fair, eight times out of nine she’s right.’
He didn’t argue. This was the rhythm of living with someone, Jess thought. You knew what each other believed. You could allude and move on. Arguments were a conscious choice.
‘For what it’s worth,’ said Robert, fussing over the sauce, ‘I agree with her.’
Jess widened her eyes in faux disbelief, reared her head back a little to emphasise the tease, but smiled while she did it.
‘I know, I know,’ said Robert, laughing. ‘I’m losing my edge.’
She still didn’t know what to do with this new-found ease. She enjoyed it, fretted about it, wanted more of it, yet was unable to relax when it occurred. She was operating at multiple levels of reality, she thought. Everyone was, in their own particular way. What was different for her now was that all her levels were transparent, like glass floors in a soaring building. She could look all the way down from her happiness, through the charm and ease that fed it, to the vertiginous lower levels of her guilt.
‘How was your day?’ she said.
He shook his head, suddenly serious.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Awful, really.’
She put her glass back down on the table and looked up at him with concern, mirroring his tonal shift. ‘What happened?’
‘Well it got off to a flying start because I had to have a Skype call with Silas, which is always, you know, an exercise in total fucking surreality. I was trying to get him to do something about the comments section. Which he totally won’t do, by the way.’
‘I told you.’
‘I know, but it’s driving me mad. Anyway, the point is that Silas has got this thing about humanising the estate story. You know, finding a single story that provides a kind of empathetic hook or whatever.’
‘Not a terrible idea. Particularly by Silas’s standards.’
‘No, by Silas’s standards it’s basically a moment of genius. So I went over to the estate and knocked on doors and asked around and all that. No-one really wanted to talk, as you can imagine.’
