The Glass Book - A London Love Story

by Christian Hayes

  Looking over his past possessions, none of which felt like they belonged to him any longer, he felt a sudden compulsion to return to Edward, to escape the squalor of his past life and take sanctuary with the man who would look after him. And suddenly, he felt his cold, bony body burning with frustration. He picked up a pencil that was sitting on his desk. Instead of putting it to any paper, he put it in his mouth and bit down until his teeth had sunk deep into its surface, until the wood had almost splintered in his mouth. He just wanted a hand on his arm, just wanted eye contact. Even to shake his hand. And at that moment the past began to rush towards him until it saturated his body, until it began to spill forth, and on the journey back words formed in his mind, a speech of some kind, a reconciliation: a heaving, streaming confession.

  By the time he reached the apartment, an entire speech had planned itself out in his mind, word for word, and his body was trembling at the prospect of having to deliver it. But first, a quick dash into Catherine’s old apartment where his cigarettes were. When he found the front door unlocked, he thought nothing of it. He was lighting a match when he heard the door slam. He hurried to it and found it shut tight, locked from the outside. There was nothing he could do but bang his fists against it and shout for help.

  ‘Open this door!’ he screamed. There was no answer. ‘Open it!’

  ‘No!’ yelled a voice. It was Edward’s voice.

  ‘Edward... Edward, what are you doing?’ Again, no answer. ‘I’ve got so much to tell you, so much.’ And then, almost without warning, his confession began to stream from him, a stream that spilled out into the corridor, that chronicled everything from the story of Mia Rose to the tracking down of Edward. Edward, however, was no longer on the other side of the door. He was too outraged to listen to anything that the stranger had to say and had left before the confession had even begun. The silence after the stream was taken by Henry Rose as an indication of speechlessness, of not knowing how to reply. He had expected such a reaction and so allowed silence to fall. Then his situation was clear: he was locked inside an empty apartment. There was nothing left to do but leave. He gathered together his final few cigarettes and left the building. When Edward later returned to the apartment, when he finally unlocked the door, he found the room empty and the window open. When he looked down onto the street, he did not see, as he was expecting, a body broken on the pavement below.

  Henry Rose died soon afterwards. Back on the street again, he was taking shelter from the rain in an old garage on a deserted industrial estate. Lighting a cigarette using a match that Edward had given him, his straw-like beard caught alight and not even the rain could put him out.

  11.

  Edward Glass was locked in the bedroom. The room was no longer visible: pages were tattered, strewn over every surface; in the corner: a shredded cardboard box, three feet by three feet. The creases in the paper mirrored the creases in the sheets, and at its centre, they were scattered across the body of Edward Glass.

  Amongst these pages of long ago lay a small black notebook. Edward’s eyes had run across every page, over every marking and indecipherable letter scribbled there. He had found the words Mia and Rose and Edward and Rose, but nothing had come of it: words upon words with nothing to say. Edward Rose is in his flat. Edward Rose walked along the street today: inane observations amounting to a sparse and fractured narrative hidden amongst names: Paul Hope, Terence Flake, Nathanial Greengrass, along with the eternal name of Mia Rose. And then there was the name printed upon the inside cover: Henry Rose, the real name of Frederick Wolf, the charlatan: the man who steals others’ identities, who walks the streets in others’ clothes. The book, if anything, was more occupied with the machinations of Henry Rose, the man with many names, than Edward Rose. And the pages do not retrace the beginnings; Edward appears out of nowhere, fully formed. One day there were no words and one day there was, long after the story had started. All there was were names-upon-names and garbled sentences. Before Edward had even had time to question the man about the holes in these pages, Henry Rose had already jumped out of the window.

  Catherine knocked on the door and opened it a few inches. She stepped inside and stood surrounded by paper. She picked some pages off the floor as though they were petals she was desperately trying to reattach. She did not read a word.

  Sitting on the bed close to Edward she stared at his wide eyes.

  ‘What have you done?’ she whispered. She picked up a few of the more tattered pages that lay around her. Edward’s eyes stared out straight ahead, never flinching, never blinking. She was almost afraid to place a hand upon him, in case he did not move. After a violent silence, she spoke: ‘Are you ever going to talk to me?’

  And to her surprise, he spoke, but to her dismay, it was only to say, ‘No.’ And then he moved, but only to turn his back towards her. Her throat became heavy. She walked over to the door, slowly, so as to give him a chance to respond, but when he did not she shut the door behind her. Sitting in the living room, she cried into her hands.

  Catherine had waited until the stranger had left the room, until he had begun his final stroll, to give Edward the little black notebook. She trembled as she pulled it out from the back of a kitchen cupboard and handed it to Edward. ‘What is this?’ he asked. She couldn’t speak; she just let Edward take a look for himself. She watched his eyes as they peered over the pages, as the words began to gather force. He threw the notebook across the room.

  ‘Where did you find that?’ he shouted.

  ‘In his jacket, the one he left on the sofa,’ said Catherine, terrified by his outburst.

  Edward did not know what to do with himself: his body wanted to move off in different directions, to tear itself apart. He had been found after all those years. The man who had helped him, the man who had appeared and disappeared, was the very man who had chased him as a child, who had appeared in the shadows. It disgusted him that he had helped him, that he had nursed him back to health. Edward quickly devised a plan and when he heard the stranger’s footsteps, he pounced, locking the empty-apartment door from the hallway and trapping the man inside. He did not wait around to hear him talk.

  He read over the book, frantically running his eyes over every page. Catherine wondered whether she should have given the book to him at all, for Edward seemed to not notice she was standing in the room; every word she said fell flat. And when Edward unlocked the apartment and found it empty, he then shut himself inside his own bedroom.

  Mia Rose came and went, visiting Edward Glass with a freedom Catherine herself did not possess. The woman in the red coat with the cigarette stood amongst fallen leaves that looked more like tattered pages and stared at the man on the bed, who stared back. If Edward blinked and suddenly noticed the room around him, she would flicker and vanish, as though she was paper-thin. Then Edward would notice the photograph he was clasping and would desperately press out the creases.

  In anger he had torn the box open, ripped its pages to shreds and thrown them around the room. When he had seen the words scribbled inside the black notebook a furious anger grew inside of him. Just to see his own name repeated, to discover that the man he had tried to help was the man who had driven his mother away infuriated him. He was most angry that he did not have time to question him, to beat out truths from that deceptive creature. It was only later, when lying in bed, that he questioned the stranger’s true connection with him. It was clear that nothing was as it had seemed, that the stranger was tied to Edward in ways that Edward never had expected. He did not allow himself to believe it but there was nothing he could do: he had already secretly resigned to the fact that this man was his father.

  The woman he had left behind all those months ago had arrived to him again through a photograph, and although her visits had been sparse, she was now standing in the room with him. ‘What do I do?’ asked Edward. The woman did not reply. But when Edward awoke he saw, in the room with him, a forest. The pages on the floor had become scattered leaves and through the
trees he could see a house, a small wooden house where Mia Rose had lived. He later discovered that this must have been the very house where he was born.

  ‘I’m going to call the doctor,’ said Catherine, her tired face peering around the door. ‘I’m worried about you.’ She did not wait for a reply this time. Instead, she returned to the living room, picked up the phone and dialled. ‘I’d like to make an appointment please... Edward Glass.’ Edward was listening: she had left the door ajar and Edward found himself rising from the bed to shut it. Catherine saw the door close from where she was standing. ‘I’ve tried to get him out of his room all day and he won’t talk to me.’ As Edward found himself pushing the chest of drawers in front of the door he heard, ‘Yes, as soon as possible...’ And by the time Catherine had finished the phone call, Edward was back in bed, the covers now right over his head. Catherine tried to enter, but the door was blocked shut.

  ‘Open the door Edward! Right now!’ She pushed as hard as she could, but it was no use. She found herself on the floor of the hallway, pressed up against the door. She thought that perhaps the sound of her tears would draw some kind of response, but by the time her tears had run dry she was still locked out in the hallway. When she realised her efforts were futile, she picked up the phone in the living room and redialled. ‘I’m sorry, I’d like to cancel the appointment...’ After that she grabbed her coat and hurried out of the apartment, slamming the door shut behind her.

  She ran down the street until her body could not take it: until she was drained, breathless. The early summer heat attacked her as she walked haunted. The streets were quiet, useful only for the sound of the footsteps that took her further and further away from her husband. But she did not need a journey to drive her away from Edward Glass; it had already begun many weeks ago, long before the stranger had ever arrived-that is, if Oliver had ever really left her. First he was merely a passing thought; she was surprised to find him on her mind at all, and only to wonder if she would ever meet him again. As the days passed, as argument followed argument, she would find herself in front of the television with Edward, thinking only about Oliver Eden. But then, while lying next to Edward, she found it hard to chase that boy from her dreams and would often find him in her head on waking. She had journeyed to that old house with the tall gate a total of three times since meeting Edward but had only recently made active her desire to find him again. She had traced a phone number, someone who may or may not know where Oliver now lived. She justified her actions by convincing herself that she was constantly being betrayed by Edward, whether it be the arguments, the silences, or the episode with the stranger. This morning’s silence pushed her over the edge.

  She spotted a phone box across the road. Crossing over, she entered. From her jacket she removed a small yellow paperback, at the back of which was written a new phone number. She dialled, and as it rang she found her body shivering; she did not know what she was doing, all she knew was she was compelled to dial this number, was compelled to find him. A voice answered. ‘Yes, I called recently about Oliver...? Yes, that’s right... One second.’ She removed a pen from her jacket and, across the inside of the small yellow paperback, she scrawled an address.

  Lying in bed Edward’s thoughts ran wild: perhaps it had never happened, the woman who had talked to him day after day, who had told him all those stories about her past, her present, her future. Perhaps that woman had not been his mother at all. He cannot remember the details. He was too young to remember the details. He cannot remember where that woman came from. She was always there. He remembered her from the very beginning, but he cannot remember before the beginning, the most vital of years. Maybe all the pages that lay around him were lies upon lies, a waste of time, a waste of paper. Perhaps his mind had played tricks on him and created a past for him to have lived, created a history out of nothing. Perhaps he wasn’t who he thought he was. He is Edward Glass who is in turn Edward Rose who is in turn Edward Glass. He is himself. Edward Rose. He is no longer a child. He is a different person now. Perhaps the past no longer matters, except that he can feel it in his bones, in his brain, a bind to the past that he never knew, a bind to a woman who is now just a ghost that haunts him. Perhaps it would have been better for Edward Glass if he had been the one to die and not his mother. This is no place for Edward Glass, a man who has already been broken and pieced back together again.

  But an old man with a craggy face had walked straight in from somewhere out of the past and shattered his delicate history into yet more pieces. This stranger had appeared out of nowhere and turned everything on its head. To think that this man had created Edward Glass was impossible to comprehend. This fact, however, appeared insignificant alongside the realisation that if this was the case, if this stranger was the father of Edward Glass, then every fact that Edward took for granted, every piece of information that Edward had ever believed about his own past, untied itself until Edward no longer knew anything at all. This man had turned fact into fiction, truth into lies. Edward must have invented his own history entirely, playing out a past that he never had. But he can see the woman’s face with its prettiness and the lips that moved, the lips that kissed, the lips that talked. He could feel everything changing. He could feel the pieces rearranging. Edward saw his new past with extreme clarity and everything seemed to make sense to him: images placed over images, erasing all he had come to believe. But then, as he thinks back upon it all, it all falls away and again makes no sense. And so confusion rises and falls within him as he struggles to place his two parallel histories. His memories lie to him, infected by dreams and fantasies, by stretches of the imagination.

  He does not know where the truth lies. Between these two histories which rise and fall within him, there is a thin, winding road that he can see clearly: beyond the horizon he senses the answers he’s been looking for. There he will find the truth, the key to lock away his past and unlock his future. And as he contemplates this little road, it becomes clearer in his mind, and as he looks hard at the horizon, at the point at which everything disappears, he sees a house. A house of wood. It holds Edward Rose as a child, Edward Rose as a baby. It holds Mia Rose before he was born. It holds fateful bloody nights and beside it the earth cups a violent sea. This is where Edward Glass must journey to, this is what he must find. He recalls it within the pages, a place name, a monument, a milestone along the way. Perhaps with the unlocking of the door will come the unlocking of Edward Glass.

  When Catherine returned, all she found were tattered pages and empty rooms. Clothes were spilling out of the cupboard and Edward was nowhere to be seen. Of all the papers that lay strewn across the bedroom floor, not a single word was for her; no note, no letter. It took her a while to make her decision, but it seemed inevitable. She stared out of the window and imagined her escape, except that this time, she acted upon it. Taking some clothes from the wardrobe, she packed a bag and left the apartment empty. All there was left to do now was travel north, away from Catherine Glass.

  12.

  Edward had not yet reached the train station. Instead he was sitting in front of the penguin enclosure at the zoo, staring at the creatures that jumped and fell and swam. Out of all the penguins, however, he could no longer identify Amigo. He stared at their faces, at their lively movement, but he could not work out which was which. It was only as he was about to leave, to walk past all the other exhibits without a glance, that a single penguin hopped up onto the artificial rock at the very corner of the enclosure, partially obscured by shadow. From there, it did not move, and from the way it stared at Edward he knew that it was Amigo. He observed the little creature, its beak, its eyes, its round stomach; Amigo never stopped staring back. Edward stood there, as still as the penguin itself, until he noticed the shadows shifting. He picked up his bag off the ground and looked at his friend once more before heading towards the exit.

  By the time he arrived at the station he was out of breath and light-headed. The bright lights and endless ceilings disorientated him
and people wound their way through an every-shifting crowd. Looking over the timetables and schedules, at the names of the towns and cities across the country, he was distracted by a small newsagent’s stall. He approached it and turned the postcard stand round and around. He picked one, a photograph of the London cityscape, designed for tourists, and paid for it along with a single stamp. He removed a pen out of his bag, wrote: I will be back end of the week. Wait for me., and without signing it, scribbled the address, stamped it and dropped it into the letterbox.

  When he had bought his ticket for the train heading south he walked out to the platform and waited there. If he had waited a little longer in the main area, he would have crossed paths with Catherine, who was just entering the station. When the train arrived, it seemed to drive right out of a cloud of dust it kicked up in front of it, as though it were pulling into the platform after materialising out of thin air. When Edward boarded his carriage, he found it empty, and as he sat waiting, staring at the door and down at the platform, no one else boarded the train. And as it pulled away he thought that perhaps later he would head up to the front of the train to check that it wasn’t completely empty, to check that someone was actually driving. But these thoughts soon disappeared as he watched the views of London speed by: urban becoming suburban, and soon, city becoming country. He watched the trees and the fields and the open blue sky with its ragged clouds as the train raced across the land. And for a long stretch of the journey, his troubles seemed to rise like steam and disappear into the sky as he drifted in and out of sleep quite pleasurably, savouring the drowsiness that had taken over him.