Nothing happens.
She waits, looking directly at the main entrance, the pillars, the white steps, all the way up to the roof with its stately, allegorical figures and their absurd tufts of buddleia. The space where there ought to be a dragon. Two or three people come in and out, it is early, mid-week, not busy.
Still nothing.
There is not much time; soon she will have to catch her bus. She crosses the slip road and stands on the bottom steps, something she hasn’t been able to do in a long time. And there, on the lower white steps, in the drizzle, as close as she dares, she feels a kind of panic rising; and nothing happens.
He takes the steps in his long stride two at a time and even he, deep in cogitation and looking forward to his meeting, feels her distress glance off him as he passes on his way up. Her image imprints on his mind between the bottom and the top step in a photographic flash. A white face, scared eyes, a mass of dark-red hair; a small figure in a tightly belted black mac, hands in her pockets. Unexpectedly, by instinct, he turns at the entrance to the building and calls down to her: Are you alright? Do you need any help? But she is facing the town now and it seems she cannot hear him: he has the profoundly dislocating sensation of having spoken and made no noise. He calls again, uselessly, into the wall of silence. He is on the verge of going back down to her when she gives a kind of shudder and stumbles down off the lower step and hurries across the park. He watches her go, then turns in through the big entrance where the sounds of voices seem suddenly magnified and restored, and heads for the woman at the desk, who recognises him, and smiles.
9.
Theo wasn’t sure what he’d expected, but ‘inconclusive’ was not it. How, he wondered, in this precise and forensic day and age, could they not analyse and properly explain something so obviously biological? A rush of irritation came over him like a hot breath. He understood then that he was annoyed not so much with the people downstairs, although he had been mildly disappointed not to find the woman with the grey ponytail again, but with Charles Fort, no doubt thrilled to the tips of his spectral being in whatever astral plane he currently inhabits, crowing at this triumph of the Inexplicable over Science, a whole enlightened century on. They’ve sent it for further tests, is all, Mr Fort: we’ll have rescued my star-rot from your host of the damned in another fortnight. Patience. Heron vomit, not the trailing mess of meteors, you’ll see.
He grins, though, to find that he has drifted into Geology. He goes looking for the section on meteorites, if simply to face them down. Grey chips of stony meteorites; shiny slices of iron meteorites, and a curious hybrid of the two, a flat polished piece of metal full of small translucent chips, like pieces of yellow amber, as deliberately, teasingly aesthetic as any piece of modern sculpture. Left-overs, says the label almost casually, from the Primitive Material, from the origins; at least 4550 million years old. Before my time, replies Theo firmly, and turns to go.
A young father holds a small boy up against the glass nearby, an exhibit explaining the formation of stars. The child looks very young for such matters, almost a baby, but the father seems intent on quietly talking him through the whole thing before kissing his small blond head and setting him carefully down. Passing as the man straightens up Theo sees with a shock that there are tears in his eyes and for the second time that afternoon feels winded by someone else’s distress. He pulls away quickly and makes for the main door. He will get the earlier train back. There might be an hour of daylight for the pond before he goes back to his mother, puts the bins out, cooks her supper, listens to her day.
10.
Thank you, says the professor, as Luke sits down with his face a little too red and his heart racing. Thank you very much for that, Luke. Now. How do the rest of us feel about this one?
There is some quiet nodding, a bit of supportive murmuring. Phoebe says brightly that she thinks it is a super idea with lots of potential. More nodding. Luke waits. Then gradually, gently, the resistance gets underway; constructive and thoughtful, they raise points of concern. There are ethical issues, of course. And questions of demarcation, as ever. Luke modestly raises his own concerns; historical depth; the difficulty of intersecting with the FF project. But mostly, it seems, they are worried about the name.
People Who Sit On Benches. I mean, would you be thinking PwSoB? Or PSB? It doesn’t really…
Doesn’t really grab.
And (this from the usual quarters): how are you thinking it will work in Welsh?
I hadn’t got that far at this stage, says Luke hurriedly, it’s early days.
Pobl sy’n Eistedd ar Feinciau, said Aslan. PEF. Or PsEaF, I suppose. Be ti’n feddwl, Leusa?
Dim rili yn … t’wbod. Dim rili yn gweithio… Dim imi, ta beth. Sori.
Do you say bainc or mainc? says somebody. I never know which to use.
Either, says Aslan.
Sitters on Benches would be SOB, says somebody else. That has interesting connotations that could work.
A bit obvious? And maybe not always true?
PSOB would be more, um, playful.
Yes, that’s not bad, I quite like that. PSOB.
The professor sits quietly, his head bowed, tapping the whiteboard marker in a subtle rhythm on his jeans and thinking not for the first time of a huge beach at low tide, acres of flat sand with ripple marks, and channels cutting through it with little rivulets branching off them, reaching outwards like veins, draining the water, sucking it down and away. Dissipation. The channels never made it to the sea. He waits two more minutes and then stands up and goes over to the whiteboard and writes:
BenchMarks / MeincNodiadau
There is a collective exhalation.
Three months, says the professor; you can have Phoebe, if you’re happy with that, Phoebe? I can see interesting performative angles to this one. Put Footsteps on the back burner. Explore Income Flow from the Council – benches are quite their thing – check the ethical side with Social Services; Sioned can you help him with that? And maybe get the Samaritans lined up for Emotional Outreach. See how you get on. If we still like it in three months’ time we can go large, contact Marketing, and see about rolling it out. Congratulations, Luke, it’s a nice one.
Luke bows his head; inside it, a younger version of himself punches the air.
And now, says the professor, we had better get back to those ontological issues with Mapping the Unmappable. Aslan is going to talk us through it. Though I think, and he grins his disarming grin at them all, that we might be needing coffee and biscuits for this one.
11.
They had kept her waiting, which was as she expected. She tried to read the book she had chosen the night before but in the first waiting room there was a woman sobbing. The second waiting room was not a room but a row of four hard grey chairs against the wall of a corridor where she read a poster about lung cancer over and over again and watched people walk up and down. The third room was pink and involved less waiting. By then she had long over-run her half-day and phoned work to say she would not make it in at all. The secretary was away, and she had got the senior colleague who asked with great concern if she was ill. She had not known what to say.
The consultants had all been men. One had been kind. One did not exchange a single word beyond confirming her name and her age and asking if she might be pregnant; he did the rest from her notes. She lay very still and mute on the bed as he inserted the device and scanned her ovaries, talking in staccato to the nurse. Afterwards he turned back to his notes and the nurse had pulled a curtain, pointlessly, and helped her back into her underwear, her laddered tights. She had wept then, in humiliation and fear. Why didn’t he talk to me? she said, suddenly fierce, and the nurse had looked surprised at the question. I’m sorry, she said. Not you, said Myra. Not you. Him.
More waiting then, ending with the kind consultant who said it was all still inconclusive but that unless something showed up on the scan they would wait for this lot of tests to come through, about a fortnight to three wee
ks, and they could talk about what to do then, plan the next stage. In the meantime he said to keep taking ibuprofen for the pain and deal with the bleeding as best she could. It might well sort itself out, he said, you never know.
The air at the bus stop is cold and wet and she is glad of it against her face, it makes her feel as if she really does exist. It is nearly four, and the day seems exhausted. She thinks then of the building wrapped in silence and decides she is not strong enough to risk any more humiliation. She changes buses in the centre of town, and goes home to her flat. There she has a hot bath, takes ibuprofen; deals with the bleeding as best she can.
12.
He feels his way out of the room in the dark. It is not possible to sleep with the child wheezing and coughing in bed beside him. Teddy is asleep, but barely; he is restless, close to breaking the surface, full of a cold that blocks his breathing, sends the air whistling round his chest. Dan has brought him into the big bed, worn out getting up to bend over the cot in the back room, hoping they can both settle, but it hasn’t helped, and he has been lying there worrying about the money and the house, and knows now that he will not, cannot, sleep.
So he leaves the boy sprawled across most of the bed and sits in the kitchen wrapped in an overcoat, drinking beer. The house is cold and all his clothes are upstairs. He lets the sadness seep back into his tired body, it is too much to hold off in the dark, and when he knows there will be no stopping it he finds the Rainer cd and puts it on. Gets another beer, lets the song do its worst and puts his poor head down on folded arms and cries.
Where we are is among the stars
The reason the house is cold is because it is suddenly colder outside. Cold enough to stop blossom, to spread an ice-film over grass. He knows that the night is clear and the air is sharp and northerly. And that even here in this city, inside the orange fug, the sky is laid bare and there are stars, her stars.
So many ways that we don’t die.
When the sobs let go of him he finishes the beer and washes his face in cold water. Then he opens the kitchen door and stands with bare feet out in the yard, looking up into the space left him by variously angled roof-lines and the neighbour’s holly. It is not enough. And before he knows what he has done he has pulled the bolt on the back gate and is out in the alley, hands deep in his pockets, cold feet heading for the park. The gates are locked but he knows the old ways through, and can still push between twisted railings into iced mud and undergrowth. He knows exactly where he is and should know how to find the path, except that it is pitch black and he stumbles around for a while with scrubby trees scratching his hands and face before breaking out onto the tarmac. He is making for the wide-open bit with the day-time view of the northern hills; the sky will be big enough there. He walks hard and fast, head down, the big Oxfam coat wrapped round his t-shirt and boxers; and wonders if there are others like him, or not like him, elsewhere in the huge park.
Leaving the path he strikes out across grass, wet and cold underfoot, the sky expanding above him until it is enough. Then he stands beneath it, neck craned, turning slowly to take his bearings and find Jane’s patch of sky, her office, her place of work, the place that now absorbs her totally. A concentration of faded light. Stars dissolve if you look at them directly; he knows, because she taught him in this very place, the trick, the way of half-looking that captures their fugitive presence.
But into his head slinks the wolf. A dark grey shape slipping through a back gate swung open, nosing at a kitchen door barely ajar, heading for the stairs. All the stardust in the universe cannot stop the panic that now sends Dan running through the park with cold air tearing his lungs, towards the trees and the icy mud and the bent railings; down the back lane and into the yard where he bolts the gate and slams the door and storms up to the bedroom, where Teddy is deeply and comfortably asleep on his back, his arms thrown out as if in flight, breathing beautifully. Dan drops his coat on the floor and, covered in mud, climbs in and wraps himself shivering around his son. His raw feet thaw into a grateful pain.
13.
A sorry mess of dead frogspawn. Translucence clouded, like the eye of a fish filming over, whiteish-grey. A week ago he had rejoiced to see the sudden clumps of jelly, that first sighting always unexpected, however much he expects it. Blighted by the sharp breath of this frost: the waste, he thinks, not for the first time, though he knows there is still hope for more. A fragile coat of ice across most of the pond. He walks round it once, checking for signs of life noted two days ago, but things are holding back again now, like the waiting buds, the creatures have slowed right down. It will come in a terrible rush when it comes, he thinks, and runs over possible permutations for the different species, the effects of the delay on their patterns of growth, their chances of breeding, of survival. It wasn’t always bad. There would be surprises as a consequence of this cold.
And it means he can still plant trees. And planting a tree this morning, ahead of all the tasks that lie waiting, would be a good thing, a way of quelling the nag of anxiety, his apprehension that everything is about to be disrupted. It is a feeling he hates worse than disruption itself. A small sturdy upright tree would somehow offset the fall. He strikes out across the field towards the nursery. Damson. Hazel? No, damson. She loves the jam. And she can still be pretty sharp, herself. He wishes she hadn’t called him by his dead brother’s name. The first time, he thinks, that she has ever done that.
As the spade pushes into the hard ground he reorganises the day in his head. He’d had to cancel the school session, because of visiting times and trains; but he could move the contract work forward by an hour and a half. He’d have an extra hour on the train – no, two, there and back – for the paperwork. Though he knows that on the journey back he will be more likely to read or look out of the window. He gets down on his knees, and his big hands gently, gradually, release the tangle of roots from the compacted earth.
14.
In spite of herself Myra is on her bench. Shivering. And still ignored. I am going back to the hospital, she thinks quietly, and I would appreciate a flicker of concern, a little kindness. She is irritated with herself for coming back at all. You said you’d go shopping, buy a nice cardigan, some new wool for a scarf, you said you wouldn’t come up this far today, you could have arranged lunch with Elin, you have only yourself to blame. But work was painful: the senior colleague has started bringing her cake. Handing it over publicly, as if to an invalid, saying how frail she looks, how pale she looks, how she must build herself up. Myra, who has no objection to cake in the normal course of things, could not eat a mouthful. She took it home, left it in the tin until it blossomed with mould, then threw it out and put the tin through the dishwasher till it shone, returned it with thanks, and waited with a kind of low-level dread for the next one. It all added to her anxiety, the thought of the waste; she felt she should distribute it among the poor or something, but didn’t know how.
She looks up to find a man standing in front of her. He has a plump, earnest face and is holding an iPad.
Ah, hello, he says; softly American.
She looks just past him, to the left of his ear, disapprovingly.
I’m sorry to interrupt …
His embarrassment is terrible but Myra is not inclined to help. He takes a deep breath.
My name is Dr Luke Stringer, I work at the University, in the Department of Cultural Cartography. I’m leading a research project. On people. Who, ah, people who sit. On Benches.
For a fraction of a second she looks as if this might be funny, but then reverts to flickering disapproval.
Luke is in agonies. He told them he would be no good at this. He is an Ideas Man. She was the only one he had agreed to interview, the one who had appeared on paper the least threatening, the most normal, an office girl on a lunch-break with a fondness for a particular place. He summons his nerve, and the words come all in a rush.
Look, he says. I’m really sorry. Please just let me show you quickly and then I
’ll leave you in peace. I’m not trying to sell anything or get you involved in anything, it’s just that we need a few stats for the mapping programme and it would be really helpful … just a few questions … nothing personal. May I show you? May I, ah, sit down?
His small deft fingers swish and tap the screen, pulling up an intricate logo with the words BenchMarks/MeincNodiadau wrapped dynamically around a stylised park bench. He taps on the image of the bench and reaches a series of questions, which he waves in front of her. Look, he says. It’s not that much really, and of course you don’t have to answer them all. Or, he adds helplessly, any of them. Of course. May I?
It is, thinks Myra, better than battling with an uncooperative building. She nods her head very slightly and moves up the bench to make room for him, holding her bag tightly on her lap.
Ok, here goes. Ah, name? Optional, of course. Miss?
Jones, says Myra, unexpectedly.
Marvellous, said Luke. That’s marvellous. Miss Jones. Ah, OK, age range? He shows her the categories. Optional also, of course.
She glances sideways at the screen. 30-35, she said.
Marvellous. Thank you. Profession?
Copy-editor.
Interesting. And, ah, how often do you come to sit on this particular bench? More than three times a week; once-a-week; once-a-fortnight; once-a-month. Less; more?
Once a week, says Myra firmly. If that. Less.
OK, thank you, says Luke, who knows that is nonsense. She wouldn’t have shown up on their Scoping Exercise if her visits were that infrequent. They were starting with the heavy-use subjects, after all. It occurs to him to wonder, with a slightly sinking heart, if she really is called Jones. But he soldiers on.
And ah, finally, if you don’t mind me asking that is, Miss Jones, ah, why do you come to sit on this particular bench?
To eat my lunch, says Myra.
Marvellous, thank you. And, ah, do you have any other favourite benches in the city?
Star Shot Page 2
