The Glass Book - A London Love Story

by Christian Hayes

  The Glass Book

  a novel by

  Christian Hayes

  Contents

  Part 1

  Part 2

  Part 3

  Part 4

  Contact Christian Hayes

  Part 1

  1.

  Everything became white and this white became everything. A thin wall divided the two apartments, two worlds playing out in parallel. In one Catherine Lucia was poised at her piano, attaining the correct posture and eyeing the keys. The music was in her head, now only to get it out. In the other, the man who had been consumed by paper was finally coming to an end. The darkness was pressed up against the windowpanes just as it had been night after night to observe the spectacle circling inside. It was the notes that rushed around her head that would save him. It was the music that would save Edward Glass.

  But not before Edward Glass, twenty-one and eight months, sitting in the thick of September, was consumed by paper. The darkness had arrived before nightfall to witness the final pages of his story. It had already observed, night after night, the chair, the desk and the lamp. It had observed the mattress and the stack of books. It had even observed the autonomous man who rose and fell with the movement of the sun, who lived life to spill words onto page upon page upon page. But it was the amount of paper that had drawn the night to his window; it had watched it grow mountainous. And the night remembered what he used to look like, one thousand three hundred and seventy days ago when he first put pen to paper, the handsome young man with a tightly locked furrow in his brow who tentatively opened the green notebook to write a short sentence. Now his hair had grown longer and his beard was as thick as the night was dark. And now that the deep ache of his stomach was taking him hostage, the taste in his mouth was becoming poisonous. The words were running dry. He wrote the mouth that did not stop moving, that did not stop weaving stories for me to hear had finally silenced and paused. The pain in his head was screaming, consuming his body until he felt as though he was watching himself disappear:

  Edward Glass found himself upon an ocean. He was sitting in a small wooden boat that sat perfectly still upon the sheet of seawater. Looking over the edge, the ocean appeared more like glass than it did water, but before he even had had time to contemplate his own reflection, he discovered that the boat was moving. It was gliding perfectly across the water, never rocking, never swaying, the water itself not even creasing. Looking out, the horizon appeared like the finest line separating the sky from the sea. He found it strange that the sky was such a clear white, and since the sea reflected the sky, it was almost as though he was sailing towards nothing: the purest white becoming whiter and whiter. Until a crash. The stern of his boat careered into the endless white, smashing a hole of the darkest black. Examining the sharp pieces of sky that had fallen into the boat, he came to realize that it was made out of pure bone.

  He awoke to find a throbbing ache at the side of his head. He lifted his head off the page and adjusted himself to the room again. As he had predicted, the end was upon him. The throbbing at the side of his head was the beginning of the breaking of Edward Glass. This did not stop him from locking his pen tight between his fingers and continuing to write. He did not have much time left and was not about to waste it on himself. Only a few words emerged: her final decision. Inside, he raged. Another word: lead. He crossed it out and wrote: arrived. In the distant past when the words did not flow he would sit and cry, but over time he taught himself to disregard selfish desires and force himself to continue. It was the same whenever he found the pain creeping around his head and through his body: he would force the pen to write harder, sometimes tearing holes in the page with the nib. But recently, instead, he found himself pushing the sharp nib of his pen into his arm as punishment; if he could no longer draw words, at least he could draw blood.

  His routine never used to be as rigorous as this. When he began, all those one thousand three hundred and seventy days ago, he would make sure he would shave every morning before sitting down to write, and every night he would make sure he would bathe before going to bed. He would write mornings only, when the light would stream through his easterly-facing bedroom window. He would stop writing at lunch to prepare himself a full meal before sitting back at his desk early in the afternoon. He would meticulously read over what he had written during those earlier hours and revise and redraft every last word. Of course, this was in the early days when the paper had been manageable. It was only when his work had been completed for the day that he would allow himself to rest. Even his relaxation had an order about it: in the earliest days, he would spend his time reading book after book after book, amassing a sizeable collection of second-hand literature. They would be books of all kinds: prose, poetry, drama, history, providing him with a library of experience. He would often find himself reading compulsively, as though finishing one of these books would reaffirm that Edward Glass did indeed exist, and through this book after book after book, Edward Glass found himself existing not in his own world but in the worlds other people had created an age ago.

  But that was earlier. Then came a night that would be a turning point. This night led to the turning-of-everything-upon-its-head, to the nocturnalising of Edward Glass, to the end of everything. It was the words that drove him, that took hold of him, that possessed him and forced him to write on through the night. And when morning came, he could not stop them. They punished him for the words he had not yet written and forced tens of thousands of words upon him in a time when most men would have written merely thousands, in a time that most men would have wasted sleeping. And when these words let go of him, it was Edward Glass who forced himself to carry on. He scorned himself for time wasted, for all that time spent reading and reading, even for all that time eating and sleeping. For seven more days and nights this continued until Edward Glass, the pen running down off the page, collapsed. He remained on the floor for the next two nights, in the most deadly of sleeps, and as he slept, day and night changed guard. That was the turning point, that was half way.

  When Edward Glass awoke, he had become nocturnal. Night and day had been turned on its head, and now it was only through the darkness that he would write and only through the daylight that he would sleep. But the words would print themselves on his dreams as if they had been branded upon his brain and he would awake to find himself suffocating, drowning in the words that surrounded him; and he would find in his bones a forceful determination to continue writing, to record these words before they would too, like Edward Glass, disappear. These nightmares would drive him out of bed and back to his desk and he would force himself to work in the light of day. But just as writing in the morning had become writing in the afternoon, shaving every day had become shaving every other day; and just as writing in the afternoon became writing at night, bathing every other day became showering every other week. Food became no food. Meals that had once been prepared became food that demanded no preparation: cold beans, pieces of cheese, cured meats. This would require regular visits outdoors, and Edward Glass would only allow himself to venture out under the cover of night, as though he were now only a shadow. But these excursions became fewer and fewer until he ceased leaving his room at all. Food became no food.

  This lifestyle caused him to fall victim to illness on many occasions, and sometimes he would lie in bed surrounded by the darkness of his room forty-eight hours at a time, unable to move. He would scorn himself for being so weak and lie there until he found the energy to make it to the sink for some water to dampen his insides. It was at times like these, of extreme hunger, when he would become obsessed with the idea of a piece of bread and these were the things that he would sit do
wn and write about-little digressions in amongst the words: tastes, textures, smells. He would describe it so thoroughly that he came to feel the warmth radiating out over his face from the piece of bread in front of him, freshly baked, and soon he could smell the scent of bread running through the room. He came to master this technique, finding these fantasies becoming more and more part of his reality, but soon they began to take over any sense of the real that he had once had, any sense of life outside these walls. These fantasies would fill his stomach in times of hunger and soon he would be passing his pen over freshly-chopped words, over words that were steaming and boiling and frying, and soon he would find these words slowly devouring his hunger.

  But now, for the first time, the words stopped making sense. He was writing just as he always had, his wrist moving smoothly from left to right, but suddenly the words became muddled. The green always had a way with the words upon a moonlight skirt. He paused with a heavy breath. Then, he wrote: The sunlight feardrop can’t quite cool the smooth of it all. He suddenly pushed his pen hard into his wrist upon where he saw the vague under-the-surface green of his vein, hoping this time he would make it through, but the nib wasn’t sharp enough. Instead, he resigned himself to scoring downwards along his arm, hoping for something to happen, and thankfully when he next put pen to paper, the ink came out a little bloody. But this method had no effect. It forced him to write, but this time the words were just not making any sense. He could not understand it as he wrote under filly hands grow long furtive traitors in a mixture of black and blood. His heart began to beat ferociously against his chest and a deep fear clutched him tightly. As he had predicted, the end was upon him.

  A cardboard box of three feet by three feet had been set aside for this very occasion. Edward Glass hurried around the room, his body aching with every movement, his head throbbing harder with every step, as he gathered together all the paper that had accumulated around him. There had once been an order to everything but now it seemed as though the order was no longer important. It was now for someone else to deal with, to work out where the beginning and the end was, which page came second, third, what came last, what came first. He imagined a team of detectives trying to figure out if there ever really was a first sentence, and whether the words in that sentence ever had any sequence at all. He imagined great expense being taken over the reconstruction of the mountain of pages that had gathered in Edward Glass’s apartment and of the pieces of the puzzle coming together only for them to realize that pieces were missing.

  These were the thoughts that engulfed Edward Glass as he gathered together the pages, and for a moment he had forgotten about the throbbing pain in his head. He first took the pages in manageable piles and placed them inside the box, but then decided to pile them high in his arms instead, page after page after page, allowing the pile to grow as high as possible. He dared himself to drop it, for the pages to spill and fall all around the room, and as he was about to place them inside the box, the pages did fall and float and flutter and crease. He purposefully dropped a few pages each time so that this process would never end, so that the end would never have to arrive.

  But the pain grew vicious inside his head and he realized that his body was punishing him for being so foolish, for being such a child. He felt tears welling in his eyes, but as before, as when the words would not come, he held them back. He tried to hit himself hard in the stomach to punish himself, to stop himself getting carried away, but lifting up his shirt he discovered that there was no longer any flesh to hit. The bones of his fist were colliding against the bones of his ribs, and when he bent down he felt so precisely the movement of the skeleton he kept just beneath his skin. And as he gathered together the pages and packed them away, he could feel the one thousand three hundred and seventy days being packed away too, as though time was turning back on itself.

  He stood silent for a moment, staring down at the box filled with paper, and realised that all this work, all this effort, and all this time could fit so easily inside a space of three feet by three feet. It proved to him that his problems were miniscule: three feet by three feet to be exact, and he resigned himself to taping up the box as tightly as he could. He wrapped the tape around the box in every direction, over and over, until the majority of its surface was covered. He pushed it into the very centre of the room, hoping that anyone who entered would notice that this was all that mattered, not the body in the living room. To make this even clearer he removed the lamp from the desk and placed it beside the box. Positioning it correctly, he made sure the light shone right down over the box and hoped that the bulb would hold out long enough.

  He had come to plan this routine in between the lines he had been writing, figuring out how he wanted it to end, and finally he was able to put this plan into action. First he made his bed, making sure there were no creases in the sheet or in the blanket, fluffing his pillow until it was back to its full shape. He aligned all his pens and pencils on his desk and centred the chair. He then collected together all the books that lay around his room. There weren’t many left now: he had been forced to sell them one by one as his money ran out. He proceeded to clean the rest of the apartment, sucking up dust from its carpets, wiping down its surfaces and polishing its mirrors. The kitchen took no time at all: since he had not eaten in such a long time, its cupboards were empty.

  All there was left to do was push the sofa up against the lounge wall but he caught himself in the mirror there and the blinding pain of his head seemed to draw him closer to the man who was staring at him through the glass. He looked at his pale, gaunt face and ran his hand over his thick black beard and through his tall greasy hair. Somewhere beneath that face he saw someone he had once known, someone who had once looked familiar, but now he was a stranger even to himself. And with that thought, the pain began to sink through him.

  He could feel it in his head and his hands, an aching metal pain that crept past his left temple, crawling deeper inside of him. His hands, as he raised them to his head, were throbbing with every beat of his heart. And staring into the mirror, he wouldn’t let it be; he clenched his teeth and pressed his palms firmly against either side of his skull. After a while, the pain subsided. Opening his eyes, he found a hollow sensation behind them. He blinked twice but the feeling remained. Staring straight into his eyes, he glared right through the mirror and directly into himself where he found nothing but a misty darkness. Distracted, he removed his socks and let them fall to the floor. The unbuckling of his belt was then followed by the unzipping of his jeans, and with each thumb under the waistband of his trousers and underwear, pulled both items down; but he only managed to get them down as far as his thighs when-his eyes staring, scorching holes through the reflective glass-he blacked out. His head hit the ground first with a resounding thud. Any closer to the imitation white marble skirting the disused fireplace, and that thud would most certainly have been a crack. Edward Glass lay faced down on the carpet, his trousers wrapped around his legs; it was a terribly ungraceful way to arrive at the end of everything. Across the wall, Catherine Lucia was about to take her seat at the piano. The music was stirring inside of her.

  2.

  Catherine Lucia lay awake. It was again the murmuring of the television creeping through the wall that kept her from sleep. She was forced to stare at the jail-bar strips of streetlight that ran across the wall from where the sounds were coming. As she dwelled upon this inconvenience, a rage would swell up inside of her and she would feel like throwing a shoe against the wall, like banging against it with her fist. Every night for the past week she had fantasised about seeking revenge, of storming along the corridor in her pyjamas and breaking the door down before reeling off a stream of abuse at the neighbour she had never seen. She had even imagined kicking a hole through the television or knocking it onto the floor to watch it smash and spark. But she knew that she never could: her lungs were too small, her will was too low. Instead she resigned to lying still and listening intently to the dim noise that cre
pt into her room.

  She needed a good sleep; tomorrow was going to be an important day. She imagined how it was going to play out: the walk to his house, the fear and the beating of her heart. She imagined the pavement and the trees and the walls she would pass. She imagined the pathway, the door, the letterbox, as best as she could remember them. She imagined the unlocking of the door, the smiles and the kisses. But she was running away with herself; such heroism would be too major a step for her to be taking so soon. Tomorrow would consist of a single phone call, and that was all. The simple dialling of numbers followed by a simple ‘hello’. That would be the beginning. She would go on from there.

  But she began to fantasise about his voice answering, the ‘hello’ being followed by a stream of excitement and joy over the bringing together of these old friends, of these new lovers. She let herself be carried away yet again, playing out a flood of ‘Where’ve you been? I’ve been thinking of you, I’ve missed you so much’ in her mind. She knew that she must stop it and so she held her breath and cleared her head, except now she certainly couldn’t get to sleep. She wanted to dial those numbers right now, she wanted to be there right now, she wanted to do anything she could to discover whether her journey here had been in vain.

  Catherine Lucia kicked off the duvet and sat up. She looked around the room at all the boxes, at the streetlight and shadow, before creeping out of bed and stepping lightly amongst the boxes. Tomorrow would also be the day that she would finally unpack. She flipped open the cardboard flap of a box only to find dishes and plates. She opened another where she found hangers and spoons and cups. It was in the next box that she found what she was looking for. She dipped her hand inside and rummaged down deep, and when her hand emerged it was holding a small yellow paperback book. She then hurried back to bed, sliding quickly underneath the duvet to escape from the cold.