by Jon McGregor
She draws her fingernails slowly down her husband’s back, she listens to the sounds she can draw from out of him, and she thinks well so at least she is wrong about that.
I woke up late this morning, I had to leave for work without having a shower and I felt sticky and straw-headed all day.
Before I left, I noticed that Michael had left the broken clay figure behind, it was still on the table, lying forlornly on its side.
I picked it up and looked at it again, resting the head on the shoulders, looking at the long thin ears, the tiny beads around the neck, the stillness of the expression.
I wondered how it had been broken.
I wondered if I could fix it, if that would be okay, if it was supposed to be like this.
I looked around for some superglue, I looked in the kitchen drawer with the elastic bands and the sellotape and the silver foil, and I found the leaflets from the clinic, the ones I’d stuffed away in there the other week.
I read the sections I’d started to highlight, I read the rest of them, and somehow it seemed a little less alien than it had before, I kept checking the clock and reading a little bit extra, stroking my belly and imagining the quiet bubbling miracle inside.
But in the end I had to put them back and run for the bus with my mouth crammed full of toast.
And I spent all day standing over a photocopier, getting tiny paper-cuts on my hands and thinking about yesterday afternoon.
I thought about how nice it had been to just spend the afternoon walking around, talking, not talking, thinking, telling each other what we were thinking.
We went to the park, and I saw the girl from the shop downstairs, I think she saw me but I didn’t know whether or not to say hello, I wasn’t sure that she’d recognise me.
I was sick behind some rhododendron bushes, and it barely interrupted the flow of the conversation.
We had lunch in a cafe by the lake, we sat by the window and looked out over the water, he told me about him and his brother learning to swim on a camping trip in the lake district, how they’d egged each other on to walk further and further out.
It was a hot day he said, but the water was still icy cold.
He told me how they stood there, shivering, calling each other chicken, a step further and a step more, until the water was tapping against their clenched teeth.
He was looking at the lake, at the people in rowing boats, and he said we stopped talking, we were looking at each other, wondering what to do next, and suddenly we grabbed each other and pulled each other forwards, out of our depth, face down into the water.
I said and what happened, he said I don’t know, I remember being under the water for a while, throwing my arms and legs around, and then somehow my head was in the air again and we were both swimming.
I told him I couldn’t swim and he pointed at my stomach and said so a birthing pool’s out then and he smiled and I laughed.
And after we’d talked some more we walked back through the park and across town to an art gallery.
There was a special exhibition on, it was only one piece of work but we were there for an hour, looking and looking and telling each other about it in hushed awestruck voices.
It was in one room, a large room with long skylights, and we stood by the doorway and looked in at it, at them, looking over them, thousands and thousands of six-inch red clay figures, as roughly made as playschool plasticine men, a pair of finger-sized sockets for eyes, heads tilted up from formless bodies.
Each one almost identical, each one unique.
We knelt there, looking at them looking up at us, the thousands of them, saying I wonder how long and I wonder if they all and I wonder what.
A small boy came running up behind us, shouting and then suddenly stilled into quietness, he said it’s like being on a stage.
I wanted to steal one, I wanted to put it on my bedside table and wake up to see it smiling kindly at me, but Michael said it wasn’t fair, he wouldn’t let me, he said it might get lonely.
I wanted to count them, give them all names, make up stories for each of them, but it seemed impossible to even begin.
And so we just knelt there without talking, looking at them looking at us, unblinking, expressionless.
By the time we came out the sun was heavy and low in the sky, we were both hungry but I didn’t want to go home.
We went and bought soup from a coffee shop, we sat on high stools at the window-counter and talked without looking at each other, our reflections laid thinly across the glass.
He said you’re not too tired are you, we haven’t done too much walking have we?
I said no, no, I’m fine, I’m a bit knackered but it’s okay I said, I’ve had a good day I said.
And we both sat there with mouthfuls of hot soup and I wondered again what sort of good I meant, I thought about the last few days, I thought about why he was here, about who he was and why he had come looking for me, what he had been expecting, what he was thinking now.
He said, my brother, he said I only met you a week ago and already I feel like I know you far more than my brother ever did, he said it doesn’t seem fair somehow.
I said oh but I feel like I know him, I said you’ve told me so much about him that I almost feel like I’ve met him properly, and he said I suppose but it’s not the same.
There was a pedestrian crossing further up the road, the signal was red and I looked at all the people waiting to cross, a huge crowd of them, motionless, blankfaced, looking up at the lights.
They looked like the figures in the art gallery.
There was a white van parked outside, two men in fluorescent jackets were loading huge reels of cable into it, shovels, traffic cones.
He said what’s the most frightening thing that’s ever happened to you?
I started to speak, I was going to say that day, that afternoon, seeing that moment, watching his brother moving to where it was, but he said I mean really happened to you, not something you’ve seen or read about but happened to you.
I stopped, and I looked at him, and I realised what an important distinction it was.
I said, I don’t know, maybe when I was a kid and I got lost at the funfair but, I’m not sure, let me think about it I said, what about you? and I sucked at the thick red soup, I wrapped my hands around the warm paper of the cup.
He said I was in the back of a transit van driving across rough ground, I didn’t know where I was and I thought I’d been kidnapped.
I looked at him, I thought he was joking but he didn’t smile or say not really.
He said it sounds worse than it was, but at the time I was terrified, I thought I was going to die.
I look at him, he’s staring at the van and he says, sorry, it reminded me, that’s all, the van, I just remembered.
I said and so what was it, what happened?
He said I was hitching home once, and I’d been there a long time, and this van stopped and these two men said I could get in the back.
He said there were no windows, just a couple of thin slits in the roof, and these shafts of sunlight were scanning around the inside of the van as we turned corners and I was catching glimpses of things in the van, bricks, ropes, a spade.
He said they kept braking really suddenly, and laughing these really high-pitched laughs.
And we’d been driving for too long he said, and they’d stopped laughing, and then we were driving along some kind of dirt track, bumping up and down, and I didn’t know where we were.
I said oh my God what did you do what happened, he said nothing, nothing happened, they dropped me off at the end of my street in the end, it was just some kind of joke he said.
He was talking quite slowly, breathlessly, he said and the worst thing was, it was strange, the worst thing, more than the fear of what might happen to me, what they might do or how I might get out of it, the worst thing was thinking that nobody would ever know, that I would just be missing, disappeared, vanished.
He looked at me
and he said can you imagine that?
He said can you imagine anything more lonely?
When I got back to my flat in the evening, the green message light on my answerphone was flashing.
I stood there looking at it, hypnotised, I left the front door open and the lights off and I looked at the small green light, blinking in the dark.
I wondered if my mother had called, if she’d had time to think and wanted to say now that she wasn’t angry or upset, that she was glad I had told her and could she maybe come and visit soon?
I wondered if it was my dad, telling me to be okay, saying that my mother felt these things but found it hard to say them, saying she loves you as much as I do you know.
And I watched the light, on, off, on, off, like a persistent knocking at a closed door, I stood closer but somehow I couldn’t press the button marked listen.
I had a sudden idea that my parents had called some people in Scotland, had somehow tracked down the boy who worked at the place where they’d held the wake, had given him my number and told him to call me.
I imagined his rich voice, made thin and brittle by the wires and the machine, bursting suddenly into my flat, saying something like hello well it’s been a wee while hasn’t it how are you.
I wondered what that sound would do to me, if I would recoil or rise up, if whether inside me, somewhere beneath my heart, something would flutter and jerk in recognition.
I remembered the words I had said to Michael, and I wondered if I could say them again, in response, if I could say I’m sorry but it was just a thing that happened, it wasn’t anything, it was just a thing.
And then I looked at the small green light and I thought of Michael’s brother, and I imagined his quiet voice hesitating out of the machine.
I imagined Michael having been in touch with him, saying I’ve met her, telling him that I’d said I’d like to meet him one day.
I imagined him by a public telephone, somewhere on the other side of the world, pacing around it, reaching and withdrawing his hand like an uncertain chess player.
I wondered what he would say, I wondered what I would say if he called again and I spoke to him.
I thought maybe I would ask him about the pictures Michael showed me, the things he’d collected and hoarded, I could ask him why he had them all, if they meant anything.
And I thought I could ask him about the broken figure, what it was, where it had come from, how it had got broken, I thought these would be things we could talk about.
And, of course, I wanted to talk to him about that afternoon, that moment, I wanted to share the remembering of it, I thought somehow he wouldn’t be someone who would say actually can we talk about something else now.
I pressed the button, and the machine said you have one messages, first message, and I listened.
There was a pause, the tiny half-kiss sound of someone opening their mouth to speak, the hard jolt of a phone being put down.
I listened to it a few times, listening for clues, guessing, rationalising.
It was a wrong number, a mistake.
Or it was Sarah, wondering whether to come round, she was just passing, it didn’t seem worth leaving a message.
That pause, short and huge, not even the sound of breathing, no background noise, no movement in the room.
And that half-kiss, the lips parting, no sound passing through them, no air passing through them, just the opening of the mouth and the clatter of the closed phone.
It was nothing, it wasn’t anyone, it was just kids, bored, phoning numbers at random, this was how I made it okay, it was just one of those things.
But I had wanted it to be him, this barely known neighbour calling from some other country, saying something like, my brother said, I wondered, I could come back soon, if you like.
It’s not that I want him, I don’t picture myself lying in bed beside him, I wasn’t listening to that sound and hoping to taste it, I just, I wanted to talk to him, I wanted to know, I wanted to say thankyou and sorry.
But it was not him, it was no one, and I went to bed and thought about the people I know and the people I don’t know and all the people in between, and it took me a long time to sleep.
Chapter 29
The man with the scarred hands eases out of his doorway, he sits down on the step and leans back against the damp doorframe, he is looking at the dark shine of the tarmac and he is thinking about the shine of his wife’s hair.
He is trying not to, it is difficult.
He remembers a time, in the early months soon after they were married and they had very little money, and his wife allowed him to cut her hair.
He remembers how easily he held the scissors, how delicate and precise his movements could be, then, his thumb and finger as flexible as when a stalking cat bends its body to the ground.
He remembers the soft weight of her hair across the palm of his undamaged hand, the slish of each careful cut he made, the broken handfuls of hair tumbling down her back and onto the floor like branches blown down a hillside.
The way she closed her eyes and quietly trusted him to not spoil her remarkable good looks. The two of them, in their empty kitchen, the noise of the world drifting in through shuttered windows, no conversation between them, his deep concentration, and when he had finished the bare floor around her chair was like a lake at midnight, still and dark and shining.
He does not speak of these things to people, there is nobody to speak them to here, nobody who knows. If he was asked he would say okay mostly, mostly I am okay, it is okay. But there are times when he feels too much, when if he could tell someone he would say I cannot possibly bear it anymore I want to tear the paper from the walls and fall to my knees and hammer upon the floor with my useless ruined fists.
He listens to the sound of the television from the front room, his daughter is watching, there are young people talking about music and football, he hears his daughter’s voice behind him and she says daddy have you ever seen any angels?
He pauses, his face squeezing into a slight frown, he wonders what his daughter is thinking of. He turns and he says I see you every day, and he squeezes her face with his wrists and blows a parpytongue onto her forehead. She wriggles away and says yuk and says no I mean real angels, and she skips onto the garden path and stands on one leg, looking at him, waiting for answers.
He shrugs slowly, he says anything is possible and smiles. Her eyes widen and she says have you have you? He looks at her and remembers the moment she was born, the nurse holding her up into the air like treasure lifted dripping from the sea, he remembers the long silent pause before that first scream of arrival, her tiny face screwed up into wet wrinkles like the stone of a peach.
He says angels? He says I do not know, I do not think so but I will keep looking. He says have you been looking? and she turns away and she nods shyly.
He says hey hey now don’t be ashame, it is okay to be looking for these things, it is good okay? and she looks at him.
He says what have you seen? and she doesn’t say anything, she stands a little closer and she says I saw wings in the sky at the top of the sky.
He says well that is a special thing, you have seen more than I have ever seen, well done you, and she smiles and her face is like the ribbon pulled from the wrapping of a gift.
He says do you want to see another special thing, and he points to the rooftops opposite, he says can you clap your hands for your daddy, and when she does so the whole ridgepole of pigeons springs up into the air, ballooning off down the street as a group, circling, landing on another rooftop in a matching single line.
He says, do you see them now, do you see they do not bump into one another, do you think this is special? and she looks at him and she thinks she should nod so she does.
He says you know in the place where you were born in, and he doesn’t say back home because he doesn’t want her to think like that but that is what he means, back home where they were a family and they belonged, he says in the
place where you were born in there would be flocks of thousands of birds, gathering at dusk, and when they turned in mid-air the whole sky would go dark as though Allah was flipping the shutters closed for a second. And not any of those thousands collided he says, do you think this is special?
He says my daughter, and all the love he has is wrapped up in the tone of his voice when he says those two words, he says my daughter you must always look with both of your eyes and listen with both of your ears. He says this is a very big world and there are many many things you could miss if you are not careful. He says there are remarkable things all the time, right in front of us, but our eyes have like the clouds over the sun and our lives are paler and poorer if we do not see them for what they are.
He says, if nobody speaks of remarkable things, how can they be called remarkable?
He looks at her and he knows she doesn’t understand, he doesn’t think she’ll even remember it to understand when she is older. But he tells her these things all the same, it is good to say them aloud, they are things people do not think and he wants to place them into the air.
Angels, he says, and she leans forward as if she is expecting him to pass on a secret. I do not know about angels he says, perhaps there are many, perhaps they are here now he says, and she looks around and stands closer to him and he smiles. But there are people too he says, everywhere there are people and I think it is easier to hold hands with people than it is with angels, yes?
He stops to get his breath back, he knows he is confusing her and maybe boring her, he knows that really he is saying these things to himself.
He says I’m sorry I am talking too much, he says come and give your daddy a hug, and she presses into him and he clamps his arms around her.
Now go and play again he says, the rain has gone, go and find your friend and keep looking for angels he says.
She stands away from him, she turns away, she turns back and kisses him on the mouth and she runs away down the street.
