I’m contemplating this little piece, which is perhaps twelve inches by twelve, pen and watercolour, mostly blacks and wispy greys, when I become aware of the solicitor, standing slightly behind me so he can look over my shoulder.
‘What horror!’
‘I don’t doubt these things happened,’ I say. ‘That doesn’t seem to be the point. The point seems to be that this culture expected them to happen. Its vision was already prepared.’
‘This morning,’ he says. ‘At the Ministries –’
‘You think I’m crass,’ I tell him. ‘You think I’m being unfair.’
‘No,’ he says. He thinks he’s going to say more, but in the end he doesn’t. He looks tired.
‘Let’s go to a bar,’ I suggest. ‘One of the bars in the square.’
Inside, the bar is full of laughter and shouting, smells of smoke and food. At one table, three women play cards; at another sit two much younger women in identical pink T-shirts. Outside, a dog sprawls among the empty tables, its body rocking with the evening heat. Someone has given it a hamburger which first it guards, then, eventually, eats. It’s some kind of winter dog, a malamute perhaps, a dog of marvellous subtle greys and whites. Also of transparent intelligence, and less transparent motive. The beauty of an animal like this appears to fix it in our expectations. But while its beauty says one thing, its heart may say another.
I can’t think of a way to put this for the solicitor, so I tell him, ‘They are very popular over here, these winter dogs from our side. But they must feel the heat.’
Then I say:
‘Back there, back in the gallery, what I meant was this: a culture to which the abuse of animals is so central should not use the pain of animals as a symbol for human pain. It’s so inappropriate. You steal their lives and their dignity, then you steal their sign –’
‘But,’ he says. ‘Don’t you think –’
‘– at which point, anyway, all it becomes is a secondary symbol of your talent for the abuse of human beings. What?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘You were going to say something more.’
‘Really, it doesn’t matter.’
On our way out, half an hour later, he scrambles past me to hold open the door.
‘Can you do something for me?’ I say.
‘Of course.’
‘Can you not do that? I find it so patronising.’ After that we walk back to the hotel in silence and part in the lobby.
Next day, on the return journey, small fat Autotelian men in perfect Armani casual clothes go staggering down the aisle of the train with their arms outstretched, as if they have never had to walk in a moving train before. Perhaps they haven’t. Perhaps it’s the first time they have left their prosperous regional town. A woman further down the carriage sings a few notes of the same song again and again to her child. Her voice comes and goes like a subtext to the journey, monotonous and without meaning. She seems tired and sad, but the child laughs uproariously at everything. ‘Geev me five!’ it can be heard demanding.
The solicitor sits opposite me. Our reservations have brought us together again. He sets out his papers and marker pens. He opens his mobile phone.
‘Aren’t you in the pub yet?’ he shouts into it, with every evidence of enjoyment. Then, after a pause, ‘Well, let’s see where we get to on Monday. Not at all. My pleasure. Have a splendid evening.’
He opens his laptop. Would I mind, he asks me, if he worked?
‘It seems bizarre to me,’ I answer, ‘that you would want to use a journey for something other than itself.’
But really I’m too tired to argue this time. Looking out of the window, I feel as I always do, that I’ve lost an opportunity. I should be in some kind of contact with things. I can see dusty paths; a figure, perhaps a man, perhaps a woman, labouring up hill in shorts. There are trees and rocks, paths doubling along the sides of dry gullies. You could walk down there. It looks as if you could walk all day in the sunshine between the rocks and trees.
‘Transition,’ the guard tells us, ‘will take place in half an hour.’
Up and down the carriage, people draw into themselves. Even the solicitor seems to notice something, though all he does is to look up from his work for a moment and smile. After all, it’s only like going into a tunnel. The world will be more or less the same when you come out of the other end. You can, at least, expect something to be there. The last thing I see is a boy, standing in a glorious waste of flowers at the end of some gardens to wave at the train. This is such an old fashioned gesture I catch my breath. To wave at a train because it is a train is a vanished body language on our side of things, generous, unguarded, agonisingly naive. On our side, children don’t wave at trains: they throw things. Their optimism has been replaced by something else.
‘Transition –’ the guard begins, but then interrupts himself.
The train slows to a walking pace. Different kinds of darkness flicker outside. There’s some commotion further down the carriage, a woman shouting in the regional language, a child beginning to scream. My back is to all that; but the solicitor, facing in the direction of travel, leans out into the aisle to stare.
‘They’ve changed their minds,’ he says. ‘They don’t want to go.’
‘You were at the Ministries,’ I say. ‘It’s all above-board. That’s why the two of us were present.’
‘Isn’t there anything we can do for them?’
‘Not now. It’s all above-board.’
‘I don’t think you understand how awful this is for ordinary people.’
‘I understand perfectly well.’
‘No you don’t. Not for ordinary people.’
We stare at each other for a moment, then, startled for the first time by the depth of our mutual dislike, away at the blackness out of the window. After a moment he clambers awkwardly to his feet and walks off down the carriage. Shortly after, there is a bump too loud for transition, an alarm goes off, the train shudders to a halt. Someone, the guard tells us, has jumped off. We are to remain in our seats. Three people have managed to get a door open, though this shouldn’t be possible when the train is moving, and jump into the transition zone. No one knows what to do. No one knows what to do five minutes later, then ten.
When the solicitor fails to reappear, I turn his laptop towards me, expecting to see a report for his client, the broad outlines of his morning’s work at the New Minstries. Instead I find this. It’s a journal entry, perhaps.
‘Outward journey. Sat opposite a woman in a reserved seat. Pale blue cardigan with gilt buttons. Cream shirt. Orange silk scarf worn over both, tied in front with a loose knot. (Hem slightly detached at one corner of the scarf.) Grey hair chopped off behind the ears, silver ear-rings in the shape of a four-petal flower. No one ever called her petal. 60 years old? Thin face, veins visible in cheeks. Lipstick. Copy of The Guardian. Copy of The Private Patient, by PD James. Complained about my computer the moment I opened it.
‘Added later: every movement on my part – getting out a book to read, or a notebook to work in – elicited a partly-audible sigh. Computer wasn’t the problem, she simply felt that to reserve a seat was to reserve the whole table. Caught sight of her legs under the table, found myself looking away – like seeing her underwear. Skin of the ankles slack & wrinkled.’
I close the laptop. The guard is walking back along the carriage towards me. At least they’ve got the train moving again.
Cries
They start between six and six thirty in the evening. They’re usually distant. If they have a motive, it’s internal and psychic: like the sounds of someone with a head wound, they are not rational except in relation to themselves. At times they seem to move closer, the way sounds do on a wind, especially in the night. For a moment, the listener is able to distinguish more than one voice, perhaps even differentiate male from female. There are qualities of both plaintiveness and aggression, but words are hard to make out. They reach a peak by ten in the evening. By m
idnight they have moved away for good, and the centre of the little town is dark and quiet.
The Walls
A man, let's call him D, is seen digging his way out through the wall of his cell.
To help in this project D has only the flimsiest and least reliable tools: two dessert spoons (one stainless steel, one EPNS); half of a pair of curved nail scissors; some domestic knives lacking handles; and so on. The cell wall, constructed from grey, squarish cinder blocks about a foot on a side, has been carelessly mortared and laid without much attention to detail. But this lack of artifice makes no difference; none of the knives is long enough to reach the last half inch of mortar at the back of each block, and the more D uses them the shorter they get. Each block must, eventually, be loosened and removed by hand, a task which can take several months, and which leaves him exhausted.
His hands become deformed and swollen. After a decade of digging, he breaks through, to find not the outside but a compartment about three feet in depth, full of dust, mouse-droppings and bundles of old newspapers tied with string. Collapsed against its outer wall he discovers the desiccated corpse of another man, surrounded by worn-down meat skewers, bent knife blades, and an artful device made by splitting and opening-out an old metal cup. This man is huddled up with his shoulder and one cheek against the wall as if in his last moments he was trying to push it over; or as if he had pressed his face up against it to try and look out through some tiny crack, the result of a lifetime’s effort. His skin, which has a patient look, is as yellowed as the newspapers.
Taking the corpse under the armpits, D drags it respectfully to one side, selects the best of the tools, and begins scraping where the dead man left off.
Years pass. He is generally full of energy; but, sometimes, when he wakes too tired or depressed to work, he’ll spend half a day reading. In strong sunlight, newsprint can go yellow and brittle-looking in an hour, giving you the eerie feeling that the news is already old. The events recorded – some tennis matches, a bombing, a fake suicide – seem historical and quaint; the people oddly dressed, their figures of speech as hard to sympathise with as their values. After a few hours, D thinks, all newsprint and thus in a sense all news, looks the same. It looks like the paper with which someone lined a drawer thirty years ago. By the same token, the news of previous generations, the kind of news he is now forced to read, looks about six hours old.
A decade of intense effort and focus enables D to break through the second wall. Disappointed to discover another musty compartment, another corpse with a puzzled expression and a selection of home-made tools, he sets about the third wall – only to reveal a third compartment; then, after a further decade, another, and another: until he has made his way through six walls, past the six dead men who can be said, in some way, to have preceded him. Like D, all these men wear the grey civilian cotton jacket in which they were arrested, over combat trousers with a beautiful if rather faded dazzle pattern of blues and browns. Their hands are as bruised and dirty, their nails as broken, as D’s. Their hair and clothes are equally impregnated with dust. But he is glad to see that each one has made some individual addition to the basic toolset – a cut-down trowel from the prison garden, a snapped hacksaw blade, a short length of soft thick metal which he suspects began life as a fire-iron in the prison governor’s quarters – and though they are dead, some of them have quite satisfied expressions.
They died, he thinks, doing what they wanted to do.
Before he breaks through the seventh wall, D decides to see how his escape is progressing, so he makes his way back, through compartment after compartment, to the cell from which he started. Accustomed to living in the spaces between the walls, he has forgotten how relatively large and comfortable it was, with its white paint, metal bed, keyhole toilet and barred window (through which he can hear, still rumbling on, the tail end of the afternoon storm). There’s even a small shelf of books!
D stops to touch the spine of Dino Buzzati’s masterpiece The Tartar Steppe. He takes it down and riffles the pages, looking for the marked lines he knows by heart. Then he opens the cell door and steps out into the dazzling light and humid atmosphere of the prison compound. The rain has already evaporated from the bare, reddish earth. High above, a brahminy kite patrols the air, all its attention focussed on something D can’t see.
It takes only a moment to walk round the cell block to the place where he expects to break through. Though he taps the wall here and there, and bends down once to touch the mortar, he finds no sign of his own efforts; yet he still feels optimistic. Before he goes back in, he looks over at the wall of the compound itself. It’s six or seven metres high, and featureless but for some black stains. Once he’s got out of the cell block, he thinks, he will have to start on that. It will be a new challenge. D’s quite excited about the prospect, so he goes back inside and starts digging again with renewed enthusiasm.
Rockets of the Western Suburbs
Listen, and it's steady straight-down rain. No wind. A car halts at the corner, pulls away in acknowledgement of its own muffled existence. Tyre noise louder than engine noise. Against this, the tendency of things to be. The rims and ribs of terracotta pots hard and slick with light. Roofs like mirrors. The bricks suck up water. Everything supported by the perfect angle of a drainpipe. This afternoon Barnes is quiet. This afternoon every garden plant is one uncanny green or another. The visitors ring the bell, wait in the doorway, too polite to come in immediately but chatter a lot when they do. They are nice. Their children always have some new practical thing, less a toy than the beginnings of a fruitful lifetime interest. Without warning (an act in itself 100% pure communication) the camera cuts away from this: very fast, upwards, turning in a series of vertical 180 degree snap rolls, so that first you see the world kaleidoscoping rapidly from a thousand feet up, then from low orbit. By the time everything’s returned to the right scale again, the rain has stopped and the sun is coming out.
Cicisbeo
Summer was half over before it had even begun. With a sense that my life was in the same state, I phoned Lizzie Shaw. She hadn’t changed.
They lived in East Dulwich now, she told me, her and Tim, in a little house ‘practically given’ them by a friend. She had worked for a while as a buyer for John Lewis. ‘You’d have been proud of me,’ she said. ‘I was properly industrious.’ She had bought a Mercedes. Enjoyed the money. Missed her kids. ‘I wasn’t getting home ‘til eight. I had a seventeen year old Polish girl looking after my family, I mean can you believe it?’ Jobs pall, she said, as soon as you start thinking like that. She said she couldn’t wait to see me. ‘People count more as you get older.’ She was thirty seven now. Then she said: ‘I’m pregnant again,’ and burst into tears.
That house was always full of sex.
‘You will come and see us?’ Lizzie said.
‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘Would that be a good idea?’
‘Please,’ she said.
I thought about it. I drove across London, intending to go there, but lost motivation somehow and fetched up in Brixton or Blackheath instead. Lizzie kept phoning. Would I go and see them again, or not?
‘Why don’t we meet where we used to?’ I suggested. ‘Just the two of us?’
‘It can’t be like that again,’ she warned me.
‘I know,’ I said.
I wanted to put the phone down and not speak to her for another three years.
‘All right then,’ she said. ‘When?’
We had lunch at Angels & Gypsies on Camberwell Church Street. She was late, a little nervous. ‘I can’t get over you,’ I said. The pregnancy threw her off-balance a little, but it suited her. ‘You look so well.’
We talked about her boys for a bit. She had got them into a good school. They were so grown up, she said. So emotionally intelligent. ‘I don’t know what I’d do without them, especially Ben.’ Of the buyer’s job she would only say: ‘I felt it was right at the time. But now I feel it’s right to be pregnant again.’
‘And how is Tim?’
‘Just the same,’ she said ‘You know Tim.’
I smiled. ‘I do,’ I said.
‘He’s converting the loft.’
‘Is he now?’ I said.
‘It’s such a little house,’ she said off-handedly. ‘He thought it would be a good idea. He thought it could be a studio.’ She ate some olives and then some bread. She sat back. ‘This is nice,’ she said vaguely. ‘I always loved this place.’
I knew that tone of voice.
‘What’s the matter?’ I said.
‘Oh, you know.’ She looked away suddenly. ‘It’s all he ever does now, really. The loft.’
I reached across the table and tried to take her hand.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I don’t want that.’
She told me about Tim. Something happened to him, she said, the day he was forty. He went up into the loft. He liked it there, the very first time he stuck his head and shoulders up through the trapdoor. He called down from the top of the ladder, something like, ‘Hey!’ or, ‘Wow!’ and that was it. Something clicked for him. Soon he was up there every available day, working, but not at his job. He had started out to store things up there. Then he was going to convert it. Then he was moving himself into it, bit by bit. He even had his own TV up there.
‘He was forty,’ she said. Looking back, you could see that’s when it began. ‘His life was so good,’ she said. ‘But something went wrong with his view of it.’
After a pause she said, ‘He misses you.’
I couldn’t take that seriously.
‘I bet he does,’ I said.
‘We both miss you.’
‘I’ve missed you,’ I said.
‘I know. I know,’ she said. ‘So you will come over? To supper?’
I began to say, ‘I’m not sure that’s such a good idea,’ but she was already adding:
You Should Come With Me Now: Stories of Ghosts Page 2
