Looking up from this paragraph, Susan heard the woman in the alcove prompt her husband: ‘It would be so nice to see him again. Jonathan, I mean.’
‘Which Jonathan?’ the husband said.
It was his sole contribution, though at one point he ordered an ice-cream. When the waitress asked, ‘What flavour would you like?’ he seemed to answer, ‘Vinegar,’ but it must have been ‘Vanilla’. The child stared at him as he ate it.
When they came to pay, his wife told the cashier: ‘I’ve got him well trained in everything else but I never let him carry money.’
How awful for a man, Susan thought, to have to wear a vest under your shirt in humid summer weather and carry no money, and be discussed with a waitress while you are sitting there, and only grin vaguely. His eyebrows turned up at the ends like an eagle-owl’s: it gave him a mildly ironic look, though on his part irony could only have been a gesture. Later, as she was letting herself into the cottage, she heard, very distinctly, the word, ‘Don’t.’
She heard the words, ‘I’m warning you, Alex.’
She heard the words, spoken in a quiet almost conversational tone, ‘I’ll kill you if you do that.’
There was such depth of promise in those words, such a certainty of purpose. Susan tried to read a little more of her book. ‘Mapped at yearly intervals, these delicate structures shift and change shape but do not die. If you were to animate their development, they would seem to eddy, like streams of smoke in broken air.’ She slept badly.
A little before ten o’clock next morning, one of Mrs Lago’s dogs broke into the cottage. It was a collie, quite well-behaved although a little overpowering, and it ate most of Susan’s breakfast. When it saw itself in the mirror at the top of the stairs it wagged its tail furiously. It snuffled in the boxes of newspaper under the stairs, peed up the chairs and played with a mouldy tennis ball it teased out from under the cooker. Susan phoned Mrs Lago, who said, ‘Oh dear, I didn’t even know he was gone. He must have jumped out of the window,’ and offered to come and fetch it. Susan, obscurely pleased by the whole incident, perhaps because it had been like having a real visitor, said she would return the dog herself.
‘I’ll put the kettle on,’ Mrs Lago said.
The sea was out a long way; persistent, misty rain had been varnishing everything since before dawn. The dog ran about in the lane, lifting its leg amiably to the brambles. Almost anything made it happy. Later, Susan sat in Mrs Lago’s small front room, looking round at the old china ornaments; the tacked-up postcards from customers gone home long ago; the rack of local history pamphlets devoted to mines and wrecks, their covers curled in the salt air.
‘Are you lonely here?’ she asked suddenly.
Mrs Lago laughed. ‘Not since I got my Dell,’ she said. ‘I follow the horses.’ The Dell enabled her to follow them realtime, all round the world. ‘Be honest, look at this place, I’d never survive the winter without a couple of bets!’ The collie whined suddenly and pushed its nose into her hand. She glanced down as if she was surprised to see it. Her skin seemed as delicate and cheap as the china. She tried to explain ‘dutching’ software to Susan.
‘I’m always rather bad with numbers,’ said Susan, who, in more ordinary circumstances, was not.
‘It’s changed the face of betting, the internet.’
‘Has it?’ Susan said.
She decided to have another cup of tea.
‘While I’m here,’ she said, ‘what’s the history of the cottage?’
‘I don’t think it’s got one,’ Mrs Lago told her. ‘It’s always been a holiday let.’
‘Come back to bed. You look so funny when you get het up like that.’
‘I’m having the bedroom empty,’ Alex said, staring viciously at the desk and the files, the bookcases and dining chairs they had no room for downstairs. ‘Completely bloody empty. I hope you’ve understood that. White walls and black woodwork, exactly as they’d have had it then. They knew how to get space round them. White walls and plain varnished floorboards. Maybe a chest of drawers. Christ!’ He was shuddering. ‘Christ!’
Sometimes it seemed to her, as they lay in bed like this, that they already lived in the new house. It would be, ideally, between the hills and the sea, somewhere in West Penwith for instance, so you could get the best of both worlds. They both loved the hills but neither of them wanted to give up the sea. They’d lived near the sea since they left college. He needed so much space. He could walk twenty miles a day when he needed to. He was actually physically better if he could do that. And he had to admit that she needed plants – really needed them – for the same reason. She needed something to grow.
‘Of course, salt’s not very good for most plants,’ she said as he put the light out.
‘That wasn’t another of the bloody things was it?’
A few days after the dog came in, Susan returned from her morning walk to find the cottage door stuck shut. She pushed at it until she was out of breath. Looking through the window into the front room, she thought she saw a movement, a white face struggling with a strong emotion. ‘Hello?’ she called. Nothing. She stood there a long time. She couldn’t see the face anymore. She wondered if she had ever seen it. When she went back to the door, it opened easily. As she stood in the hallway she heard a calm woman’s voice say, ‘Don’t you dare come in here. I’ll kill you if you come in here.’
She heard that voice say that three times, ‘I’ll kill you if you come in here.’
She went straight out again, down into the town, and walked about until she found herself in a little triangle of concrete at the corner of two lanes, chained off from the traffic and with a low parapet fronting on the sea. There were a couple of litter bins and some blue-painted benches. On the wall hung a red and white life belt with the letters PDC in black block capitals. Susan decided she would sit down there until she felt better. Across the bay the speedboats went in and out, boys standing rakishly in their bows. Closer, the Lamplighter Gallery, with its yellow shutters and careful resident landscape artist, advertised a clifftop outing, ‘binoculars provided’. Susan coaxed a local cat on to her knee, where it sat amiably at first, thick-furred, tabby and self-involved.
‘Well,’ she thought, ‘I am honoured.’
The Lamplighter closed for lunch and then opened again. The inshore lifeboat went quickly across the bay, returning about twenty minutes later. Tourists passed down the street behind her, saying, ‘We’ll have to see if there are enough towels,’ and ‘Here’s a lady with a cat.’ All of this was quite calming. She sat on with the cat. At first she had assumed it was a stray, independent in a town of discarded fish and chip wrappers but still on occasion lonely for human company. She felt pleased at how quickly they had taken to one another. But then an oldish man in a blue blazer came and told her its name. ‘She’s called Trixie,’ he said. He smiled into the sun. ‘And she likes corned beef.’
He was carrying a packet of frozen beefburgers in a thin plastic bag, the neck of which was twisted several times round his suntanned, square-tipped fingers. You could see, plainly, ‘Birds Eye’ through the plastic where it was stretched tight. After that everyone who came past, even some people who were only visitors like herself, seemed to know the cat. ‘Soft thing!’ they said, addressing it more than her. ‘Anything for a warm lap, that one.’
‘Go on home, Trixie!’
Somehow this made Susan feel cheated as well as left out. The cat not only had a home, it was part of a community from which she was excluded. She felt a fool. When the first drops of rain fell, and she wanted to shelter, the cat was reluctant to move off her lap. ‘Off you go,’ she said. She tried to pick it up and it bit her, as she had known it would. The rain drove her back to the aquarium, where the air was hot and curiously dry. The eyes of the sharks glittered suddenly in the clarified light. An octopus hung high up against the glass of its tank, stuck there motionless but pulsing gently, waiting, even more patient and alien than the sharks, for that change in the nature o
f things which would permit it to take up its rightful place.
‘They’ve got fantastically developed vision,’ said someone, ‘apparently.’ A pause. ‘God knows what they use it for.’
Susan stared at the octopus and thought: I must go back. I must go back and pack my things. Outside it had stopped raining and the sun was out. As she stood in the doorway of the aquarium, blinking in the clean windy light, two women got out of a taxi in front of her. The older of them said in a voice rich with received pronunciation:
‘One of us should look after the child.’
By then it was late afternoon, and raining again. The way the clouds toiled in over the sea, it could have been October. Susan packed her wheeled suitcase and tugged it along the lane to Mrs Lago’s house. It bogged down in every puddle. She had called the local taxi on her mobile; the keys to the cottage, she kept in her hand all the way down the lane. ‘I want to give you these,’ she said, holding them out to Mrs Lago. ‘I can’t stay here another night.’
She would prefer to be back in London, she said.
‘Something happened here,’ she said.
Mrs Lago seemed slow to understand. She had been sitting in the gloom when Susan banged on the door, her face lit up in a faint but chaotic procession of colours by the screen of her cut-price laptop. There was a full ashtray near her hand; a cold cup of tea. She had folded an old tartan picnic blanket across her knees. The results of a bout of dutching at Far East courses had caused a bruised look to settle around her eyes. Her vagueness and lack of contact with the world only served to increase Susan’s sense of urgency.
‘Those two arrived here as nice a couple as you’d want to meet. But in the end –’
‘Which couple?’ Mrs Lago said.
‘In the end,’ Susan carried on, exasperated, ‘they fought each other all over the place. She picked up the hammer and he picked up the axe. They fought each other all over the house, in the garden, and up and down the lane there. They stalked one another in the dark.’
She shivered.
‘I saw them,’ she said. ‘Hit and chop, all afternoon and evening, waiting for each other, slipping behind the trees.’
The woman stared at Susan. She tapped the keys of the laptop, the screen of which darkened suddenly. It was clear she didn’t know how to respond.
‘Goodbye then,’ said Susan.
She dragged her luggage to the end of the lane to wait for the taxi. She jumped at every sound. Every noise sounded like an axe or a hammer, and the sunset was like blood over the grey headland. I don’t know what I might see, she kept saying to herself, I don’t know what I might see. ‘They were like animals,’ she had said to the woman. ‘Just like animals.’ But she saw nothing and nothing happened to her, and soon enough she was on the train.
Back in London, she took to locking herself out of the house. She dreamed that her urine was corrosive, woke confused in her own bed. Her children were puzzled. It seemed to them that she had gone downhill quite suddenly; it was a pity, at that age, to be already forgetting your keys or phoning people late at night to talk. Things came to a head a month or two later, when a man in an unlabelled delivery van charged her five hundred and fifty pounds for bringing the roof of her bungalow up to European safety standards. It was evident he’d done nothing, but Susan allowed him to drive her down to the bank and wait outside to make sure he got his cash. She was upset when she thought about the incident later; but in a distant way, as if she was observing someone else’s humiliation.
That night, unable to sleep, she went round and round the bungalow in the dark, touching a teacup here or a cushion there, boiling the kettle but letting it lay, listening to the distant thread of traffic on the M25, until she ended up at the sitting room window, staring into the dark.
Of course I knew really that I shouldn’t pay him, she thought.
Dense shrubbery on either side gave the garden a sense of being larger than it was; its boundaries were postponed. Something moved out there briefly and she could smell the autumn leaves for the first time in years, a strange smell, acrid and exciting: the smell of change. It’s a smell, she thought, that you must never try to compare with anything else, or evoke by mentioning some other smell. It reminds you so forcibly of childhood, when every seasonal change had its excitements. Mist lying in under the north slopes of the low hills, making them dark and mysterious against the bright blue sky and dazzling winter sun. Chimney smoke from white cottages. Wisps and feathers of high icy cloud splitting the light like rainbows.
Under the Ginger Moon
The bird calls here get stranger and stranger. Sometimes we wonder if we’re in Stoke-on-Trent at all. We sit counting our mosquito nets, while the 787 Dreamliners lug themselves into the air above us like suitcases full of cheap new clothes. Yesterday evening there was a wedding in the courtyard. The bride and groom processed slowly to their carved and decorated chairs, where they were soon surrounded by the traditional circle of softly-glowing camcorder screens.
In the Crime Quarter
He worked out of a small office the only feature of which was the clarity and interest of the screen saver images. They were beachscapes exotic and hard to place, with a sharp, travelogue quality. He had the screen positioned so it was impossible to ignore these glimpses as they dissolved into one another; while to the client he presented the city as a surf of buildings and people and consumer goods. The motives that powered it were tidal. Unpredictable winds played against masses of water, currents too complex to understand. Crimes were whipped off the crest of events like spray. ‘A great wave,’ he would explain, ‘composed of the billion actions of the very citizens it curls so threateningly above!’ It was the perfect experience of art, he said, in the perfect space – art as an aspect of architectonic and thence, with perfect logic, of lifestyle. His clientele were not so sure. These carefully groomed and dressed art tourists would look across the desk at him with a kind of puzzled distaste, wondering if they were in the process of making a mistake. They understood their own inauthenticity: they weren’t, at the outset anyway, so certain about his. The women had come for the sensorium porn. The men, though they would pretend to enjoy ‘seeing the world from a different point of view’, were only interested in donkey crime.
The Good Detective
Primrose Hill, that hour when things get hold of you, five o’clock on a dull Saturday afternoon. Single fathers are leading their little girls up and down the wet pathways and you can see the Regents Park birdhouse draped like fruit netting across the nearer trees. A systems manager walks away from his first wife. All she was doing was making a phonecall, answering a text. She looks up and he’s gone. He’s taken the children with him.
Where is she supposed to start looking for him? The world’s full of harassed men his age, with two daughters and a suitcase. The trains and buses are full of them.
Eventually someone puts her on to me. She’s upset. It’s new to her, but frankly I’m used to it. People do this all the time. They’re trying to get away from themselves. They’re trying to reinvent, and why not? London’s kind to the confident. Otherwise, what is there? Get on the tube in the morning and people stare straight into your face from less than one foot distance. That’s no way to live. So they go missing, and I find them. I find kiddies and criminals, and people who would do crimes if they knew how. I find the people who paint themselves on to your walls, play their favourite music over and over again then leave you nothing but a picture in the night.
I never look for the ordinary ones. They’re too easy to find. They’ve cashed in on the housing differential, abandoned Islington. They’re off to the provinces: no mortgage, walk the children to school, grow your own vegetables. They’ve disqualified themselves.
Listen to this, though –
A man lives in Putney, Barnes, East Sheen, one of those places along the river. He’s an actor, an investment banker, a publisher’s editor – it doesn’t matter. Or he sells something, say mobile phones. Say he sells mobil
e phones. One day he gets tired of that. He decides to write a travel book about the area he lives in. This area is two miles on a side, roughly square, no hard boundaries. That is, it’s bounded on its north and west by the curve of the Thames: but he can cross that if he wants, and enjoy the other bank – willows, a couple of muddy playing fields and an old bandstand. A little road with allotments on one side which in the spring looks like a lane in the country. Over there it doesn’t look like London at all.
This man buys several notebooks of the brand the famous Bruce Chatwin used to use for his writing. He buys some gel pens of different colours. He buys a Nikon 775 digital camera. Then he sets off into the streets which surround his house, intending to record everything he sees.
Winter. Late afternoon. Christmas is close. It’s on his heels. The streets are dark and at the same time comfortable, narrowed by cars and a sense of warmth, a sense of drawing-together which seems to come from the houses on either side. The women have fetched their kids from playschool and finished parking their SUVs. In one street of little workingmen’s cottages they close the curtains; in the next there are gleams of light from every window. Every street has its own culture. Here it’s more BMWs than Audis; there, they’ll keep a pedigree dog but a pedigree cat is extravagant. Wood floors, a child sitting on a sofa with its knees up, watching something you can’t see. She stares out, startled by the flash of the Nikon. The traveller smiles, waves, moves on. Is that the river at the end of the street? Is that a Toyota? He’s already lost.
To begin with, he brings all this back. From the Nikon he downloads smoky still images of Barnes bridge, taken a few hundred yards downriver on an afternoon that makes it look like industrial archeology in Manchester or Bremen. His notes say: ‘Every rivet stands out.’
You Should Come With Me Now: Stories of Ghosts Page 13
