Before the Ruins

by Victoria Gosling

  I preoccupied myself with looking at my hands and willing him to stop. It would have been bad anyway, but being stoned made an agony of it. It was the braying edge his voice took on, his tone both superior and queasily desperate. It was almost as if he was trying to make you hate him, when of course, his intention was the exact opposite.

  When he did suddenly stop, I glanced up to see David had laid a hand on Peter’s forearm. The touch can’t have lasted a moment. I wasn’t sure if anyone else had even seen it. In the silence that followed, someone suggested leaving.

  * * *

  David walked us to the van where Marcus rummaged until he found a pen so we could write down our numbers. When it was my turn, I hesitated.

  “You can try this if you can’t get anyone else.”

  “It’s for the box. Andy doesn’t have a phone. You have to call the phone box at the end of her road and sometimes she answers and sometimes no one answers, and sometimes you get a passerby,” Em said.

  David folded the note and put it in his pocket. “Although if this is the last day ever, I guess there isn’t much time for me to use it.” While he was not looking at me in particular, in fact was turning from me to pat Peter on the shoulder and tell him that he must come back and try out the piano, I thought I felt the slightest stillness among his words, like the spot in a stream where the blank surface hides unexpected depths. And then, as we piled into the van, he glanced my way, as though to see if I had noticed it.

  On the way back, we were quiet. I turned round in the passenger seat. Em was flicking through her sketchbook, but Peter’s eyes were closed, his arms wrapped around his knees. I figured that he was hating himself for his performance back at the manor. I had a way of bringing him out of it when he got like that; the trick was to make him focus his disgust on something outside himself. Shit music. Shit telly. Shittest album, actor, newsreader, DJ, politician. Biggest prick at school among the sixth form, biggest prick among the staff. Get the venom going, get the fangs bared and pointing outward.

  But this time, I turned back to look at the road and left him to stew in it. It was not just that Peter was leaving, it was that he was so desperate to be gone; to embark on a new life at Oxford among his future friends, a cast he’d assembled from the pages of books by Evelyn Waugh, and men he referred to initially by surname—Wilde, Huxley, Auden—and then, as though they had, over crumpets and tea in their rooms, moved on to first-name terms, as Oscar, Aldous, and Wystan.

  “You’ll come back to see us, won’t you?” I’d asked.

  “I expect we’ll motor back for the odd weekend.”

  Because that is what Oxford promised, weekends of motoring in the countryside, picnics under trees with companions who would, after the wine had gone to their head, rest their cheek upon his arm, sigh and close their lovely eyes. It was his grail and I had no role to play in it.

  When I was fourteen, after Joe had gone, after I dared believe it was for good, I had stopped going to school for a while. I found other companions, other ways to have fun. When I came back, I’d expected the crevasse between me and Peter to disappear, but it didn’t. Half the time it was like he wasn’t even there, like he was off somewhere in his own head, and he never wanted it to be just us, just me and him. If I suggested we go off on our own, he made excuses. At first, I’d thought he was punishing me for disappearing, but it wasn’t that. It was like I wasn’t safe anymore. That was how he’d treated me, and even now the unfairness of it made my eyes sting so I had to stare hard out the van window at the blurring hedgerows.

  On the high street, Marcus pulled up and Em and Peter got out. Em had choir and despite my threats of rivers of lava and Death on a white horse, she’d pledged to go out with a handful of old ladies singing Queen medleys. We were the same height, but that’s where the similarity ended. She was a fawn, Em. Not a pick over seven stone, and all fringe, eyelash, and skinny leg to my tits, arse, and lip. The same guys who at school shouted at me to get my tits out got tongue-tied around her, but I could never push her around.

  “Em?”

  “Not possible.” It was what she always said when she didn’t want to do something. A sad shake of the head, a sigh. “Not possible.”

  “Pete, we pick you up at eight?”

  “I’m going to stay home and revise. I’ve got that last exam, remember.”

  “Pete, please!” It was Peter I wanted really. It always was. Games weren’t the same without him. “It’s the end of the world.” But he shook his head. He wasn’t playing anymore.

  We went for a drive, stopping for a pint in the beer garden of the Red Lion at Avebury where we could look out at the stone circle. Marcus had a shandy because he was driving.

  “You could get drunk if you wanted to. Won’t matter if there’s no tomorrow.”

  “If I got caught driving Darren’s van pissed, I’d be praying for the apocalypse.” He looked away. I had the sense he was tired of it, that he wanted me to let it drop. But that wasn’t quite it.

  “Andy—” Marcus looked about the garden, as if for help. Two women, a decade older, were sitting at a picnic table a way over with crisps and Cokes. One of them caught Marcus’s eye and I saw her whisper something to her friend and they both laughed quietly. On Friday afternoons and Saturday mornings, I worked in Darren’s office, sorting out the timesheets and helping with payroll. There was a new computer program that would, once it was set up, calculate everything automatically, and I was learning it since the two women who worked there refused to go anywhere near it. Most weeks Marcus picked me up after football, often still dressed in his kit, and Jules and Karen were the same as these two, purring and cooing over him, asking if he’d scored any goals, telling him he was the spitting image of Michael Owen, and offering him Jaffa cakes.

  “What is it?” My voice came out less friendly than I intended.

  “Uncle Darren phoned this morning.”

  “Yeah?”

  “And he needs me this evening. He says it’s important. Some travelers have got into one of the sites. They’ve got a sound system. If we don’t get them out now, it’ll be rave central. Then there’ll be no getting rid of them. You and me can do something tomorrow.”

  “There is no tomorrow.”

  “Come on, Andy. Don’t be—” He looked at me helplessly. He had brown eyes. They weren’t like Peter’s, which in some lights appeared almost orange. Marcus’s eyes were depthless, a hardwood brown. I never wondered what he was thinking. But he was quick to put his hand in his pocket, and didn’t count what I owed him, and he drove us about, and other girls wanted him although he acted like he didn’t know it. “We can stay here for a bit. Get some chips in town.”

  I told him not to bother, and on the way back I gave one-word answers to his attempts at conversation, relenting only when we pulled up a hundred meters before the house, at the spot where he always dropped me off. I gave him a quick kiss, since it didn’t do to push Marcus too far, got out, and watched him execute a three-point turn in the lane and drive off.

  Our house was on the end of a row of farmworkers’ cottages. They were tiny, with thick walls and small windows. The council owned them. In the seventies, indoor bathrooms had been added on the back, but ineptly, with minimal insulation, so that in winter it was like trying to wash in the middle of a freezing field.

  Mrs. East was standing by her garden gate. A pack of B&H king size sat atop the low brick wall and as I came nearer she picked it up and shook it at me. I took one and she lit it with the lighter made out of a bullet casing that her husband had brought back from Germany after the war.

  “How’s you then?”

  I shrugged. Mrs. East’s hair hadn’t gone white or even gray. Peter once suggested she blacked it with shoe polish. After we’d put the slowworm through her letterbox, terrified that we’d killed her, we’d plucked and left a rose on her doorstep each day for a week. From her own front garden. While we intoned the Lord’s Prayer. We only stopped when we heard her cackling through th
e door.

  “Have you seen her?”

  “Not today. You had your tea? There’ll be cauliflower cheese in a little while. Countdown’s on in ten minutes.”

  “Richard Whiteley’s a tool.”

  Mrs. East let out a plume of smoke and cocked an eyebrow. It was not how I had envisioned the day panning out, but it was better than going home, and in the event, I wouldn’t have changed things, since not only did I beat Mrs. East for the first time ever, but the word I got, ABALONE, was a seven, a personal best.

  Mrs. East saw me out. At the gate, she stopped a few feet ahead of me and pointed skyward. A hawk was hovering over the field opposite the cottages. The sun was setting, and in its rays Mrs. East’s ears were translucent, pink as seashells and tracked through by tiny veins. I looked up. The sky was whitening, the bird barely moving. For the briefest of moments, I felt myself disappear, had the disconcerting sensation that I was both the hawk and whatever creeping thing it was tracking, and then the feeling was gone and what remained was a sickening jolt of déjà vu and in the red phone box, the telephone started ringing as I had somehow known it would.

  CHAPTER 5

  TOWER

  Two days after Patricia’s phone call, I arrived at work to find, on my desk, a copy of a best-selling book. It was a memoir of a middle-class white woman who finds happiness by going on a long holiday, dabbling in soft-core spirituality, and getting a man. Oliver. Six months back I’d made the mistake of getting drunk with Oliver. I’d only meant to have one or two, but the brakes had utterly failed, and at some point into the third bottle of wine I had said something to him about wanting to change.

  “Change what?”

  “My life.”

  Now every once in a while Oliver would reference the moment. He had sent me a link to a video of an old Tampax ad in which a woman roller-skated joyously on a beach. Another time, he’d signed me up to a sponsored parachute jump. A letter had arrived at my flat thanking me for my interest in building schools in Africa. I dropped the book in the trash and opened my email.

  There’d been no answer to the thirty or so calls I’d made to Peter’s phone. Nor was there a reply to the string of emails I had sent. Now I typed another: Patricia is worried. It’s time for a turn. And then, as an afterthought, I am worried too. A turn. That was what we called it when it was time for Peter, Em, or Marcus to return home and reassure various parties that they were still alive. A quick turn, I’ll be back after dinner!

  Even after I sent the email, I struggled to focus. The office was open plan and from my desk I had a view over the atrium and the desk-bound gatekeepers nineteen floors below. It was a tower, a tower whose music was air filter and fan, rap of heel on polished floor, tap of fingers on keys. There was not a blade of grass or a breeze, not a creature, only a tinny fountain in the marble foyer and a few captive plants, and yet how the shoulders around me hunched over the screens, how the eyes were fixed. We worked long days. Much of the year, we hurried home in the dark and hurried back before it got light, only to find the work was no closer to completion, as though our dreaming selves had unpicked it overnight. It had no magic, but it was not unenchanted. I had come to London when I was twenty-one. Seventeen years it’d been my home. Of those, seven I’d spent here.

  Before me, a cursor flickered against a bright white page, empty save for the title Compliance Initiatives in Response to New Regulatory Safeguards. It was my job to write such reports, and shout at traders, and sign off on deals, enforcing the rules of the game that accounted for 11 percent of the UK’s economy. But I did nothing, because I was harried by visions of Peter, not latter-day Peter but original Peter, ur-Peter, on the stone bench in the playground alone, jiggling a foot. Hunted down the corridors by bigger boys for wearing a homemade cape to school. I told myself that Peter was a big boy, able to look after himself, but all I saw was Peter as a small boy, Peter and I chasing raindrops down windowpanes with our fingers on wet days at school, our breath clouding the glass. On very rainy days, they sometimes gave us hot squash. We liked hot squash.

  On a piece of paper I scribbled down the options. What I was left with was 1. Peter was not answering his phone or emails because he didn’t want to. 2. Peter was not answering his phone or emails because he couldn’t. This second possibility led to further options: a. Peter was dead. b. Peter was sick or injured. c. Peter was being prevented from answering his phone or emails by person or persons unknown.

  I found myself wanting to tell someone. Oliver? He would be dismissive. I thought of other colleagues I was on friendly terms with, with whom I occasionally lunched or grabbed a quick drink at the end of a particularly long day. Over the years I’d been confided in. Steph’s messy divorce, James’s stint in rehab, Petra—her face entirely expressionless—telling me that she wished she’d never had children. But none of them would do. Suddenly I knew who I wanted to talk to.

  Not possible. Not possible.

  Midmorning I called around the hospitals to ask about unidentified admissions. They told me to contact Missing Persons, but that would be a job for Patricia if it came to it. Instead, I searched the Internet for Peter. I sought him here. I sought him there. But he eluded me. There were so many Peter Whites, enough to fill a football stadium, and although I peered among their ranks, I could not find the distinguishing mark that would identify my own. Nor was I surprised. Peter had given me his views on social media, on “maintaining an online presence” during a stroll by the river a few years before.

  “You’ve heard of Bentham?”

  “’Fraid not, Peter.”

  “He was one of those eighteenth-century types. Did a bit of everything, philosophy, law, social reform. When he died, they stuffed him and put him on display at UCL.”

  “Seems a bit harsh.”

  “Oh, it was what he wanted.”

  The Thames hurried past like a man on urgent business. The rain and wind were coming every whichaway and had deterred most other strollers. I had come out without an umbrella, so Peter was trying to shield both of us with his.

  “I think you’re digressing. Tell me how Bentham has prevented you from posting updates about your cats on Facebook,” I said. “Mittens seems a bit sad today. Or, Mittens stole my sandwich.”

  “Jeremy had a dream. It was for a prison. But being a progressive, kindhearted man, Bentham shied away from the kind of dungeon intended to either kill you or terrify you into behaving yourself for the rest of your life. He envisioned a Panopticon Penitentiary, a prison built in such a way that the inmates would all be visible from a central watch post, but would be unable to tell if they were being watched. They might be being watched all the time; they might not be watched at all. He believed that even the possibility of being observed would change the behavior of even the most hardened of sinners. He said it was a new mode of obtaining power over people in a quantity ‘hitherto without example.’ But even his ambitions pale into insignificance now.”

  “Not even LinkedIn, Peter? It’s for business.” He shuddered visibly. We were both wet. There were tiny droplets on his glasses, and his face was gleaming not only from the rain but with the come-to-life quality he took on when speaking about something he was interested in. I didn’t quite believe him, was sure there was a Romeo or Grindr account somewhere with his profile picture on it, if not his name. But perhaps not. For some reason, I found myself thinking of Peter’s angel.

  By lunchtime, my insides hurt, as though something within me was rupturing, perhaps the place in which I kept the past safely lidded. I gave up on getting anything done. Instead, I googled Jeremy Bentham and read that along with his other achievements, he had coined the term “deep play,” which he defined as a game with stakes so high that no rational person would engage in it. There was a portrait of him, a fleshy man, with shoulder-length white hair and a bald pate. His face wore the expression of someone eminently capable of filling heavy books of tissue-thin paper with minuscule print, the kind that with a pistol pressed against your head and
forced to choose, you’d rather eat than read.

  The news websites were full of atrocities and celebrities. There was more about the endless rain, and on a couple of sites these stories ran side by side with updates on the latest leaks, as though there was a connection between them, the falling rain, and the drip of confidential information about offshore bank accounts and secret payments and highly prominent world figures. It was all there, from tax avoidance by famous actors known for their public moralizing, to billion-dollar money laundering schemes run on behalf of criminal empires. And the corruption and embezzlement and outright theft were on such dizzying scales that the celebrity articles were a relief, a mildly poisonous anesthesia with which I tried to obliterate the feeling of helplessness.

  I sought to lose myself in clicking, like a child following bread crumbs in the forest, not even looking for Peter anymore, but still possessed by the sense that I was somehow following a trail, a trail with an end to it. And I thought that perhaps that was what everything in my life had in common: work, and buying things, and going to the gym, and eating meals, and looking at things on the Internet, that they felt like necessary work, resulting in progress toward an unspecified goal.

  I bought a coat, some cosmetics, a pair of flip-flops, a bottle of high-end vitamins, spending £400 before I knew what I was doing. I accidentally saw a photo of a man moments before his beheading, eyes wide, head pulled back. And so the day passed.