He doesn’t fear the silence.
Like now:
Mr Wolphram reads the poem about the panther:
It seems to him there are a thousand bars;
and behind the bars, no world.
As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a centre
in which a mighty will stands paralysed.
Ander thinks that the man’s voice frees the poem. It’s ironic, really, he thinks, since the poem is about the opposite of freedom. Then he lets a long pause stretch out over the room. Someone tries to speak and he raises his hand to stop them. ‘Let it settle,’ he says.
Silence – and there’s something endless about it though it’s only a few seconds long. It’s not one of the usual varieties, either: embarrassed or agonised or apathetic or insolent.
If it were just about a panther in a cage, says Danny, who is the first to speak, we wouldn’t be here discussing it. Ander comes in over him and says but it needs to be about a panther in a cage before it can be about anything else. It needs to work as a poem about a caged animal first; after that it has to be about something else or else it’s not really a poem. He’s surprised to hear himself, and to begin with he’s not even sure it’s him speaking.
‘It’s like the opposite of speaking normally,’ he goes on, and it sounds limp and clumsy; and anyway, he thinks, as the words clatter from his mouth, why would you want to do that?
The teacher looks interested by this. The glaze of indifference burns off his eyes because he starts to look at them properly. He blinks slowly. It’s the down-tug of the float on a fishing line, very slight, but enough for someone who knows to know: a tremor of interest, the knowledge that there’s something down there.
‘Go on,’ he says. It’s encouragement. This, too, is new to them.
Ander says it’s like that polar bear out there in his enclosure, who maybe remembers the white acres of his cubhood, but also that it’s like people, who have desires (he feels strange using that word, it excites him to speak it, and he enjoys having a place in which he can use it, even if it is just a poetry discussion) but whose world shrinks until they forget the bars and think their cage is all there is. Ander doesn’t quite use those words, not back then, but he remembers it as if he was saying those exact words.
Eventually the bars don’t even need to be there, he goes on, it’s like when you take the bucket off the sandcastle and the sandcastle stays up. That last bit, about the sandcastle, he doesn’t know where it came from, but it’s something he remembers from the fag ends of the summers in Ostend, the sand already wet, like it doesn’t even need the sea anymore. Like the sand under the bridge, too. He thinks he’ll like poetry – that way of advancing with words without actually going forward. He likes the way things can be explained always by what they’re like not just what they uniquely but boringly are.
Everyone is quiet. The teacher nods, smiles.
‘You suppose our bear was born in the wild? Or that the panther was? Perhaps the bars are all it knows.’
‘Maybe it’s … I don’t know …’ says Ander, ‘maybe it’s not actual memory but just something he feels, like an instinct?’
‘Maybe. And what sort of cages do you think he means? What sort of bars?’
‘Classroom!’ someone shouts out. Everyone laughs.
‘The classroom. All right, that’s certainly one kind of cage, yes. And not just for the pupils,’ replies Mr Wolphram, looking to see if anyone gets his modest joke.
‘Jobs,’ says another, ‘Nine-to-five.’
‘Oh, absolutely.’ It is Mr Wolphram’s first smile.
‘Getting married,’ offers Jonny Kebab, the class Casanova, who claims to have fingered his friend’s sister. Jonny Lansdale got his nickname by being skewered by a javelin one sports day. Everyone remembers it because of his dad, who ran onto the field as if to tend to his injury, but instead slapped him for getting in the way of the athletes.
The smile goes. Mr Wolphram looks at Ander as if to say You started this, now finish it: ‘An instinct for what?’
Ander wants to get it right, supposing there is a way of getting this sort of thing right.
‘Your body, the things it wants but you don’t know about … the things it does that you don’t want it to …’
‘Or that you do?’ answers the teacher.
No one speaks. The teacher leaves Ander’s comment and his own hanging in the air and explains the poem. Ander was right, it isn’t about a panther. The panther in the cage is … a word he hears for the first time, and wonders why he went so long without knowing it – fourteen years is a long time when you don’t have the right word – a metaphor.
‘This is a poem about captivity,’ he goes on, ‘about what holds us captive. Nowadays we would say that the panther suffers from zoochosis, the kind of abnormal behaviour you get in animals – like that polar bear – that are imprisoned in unnatural environments without enough space for their bodies and enough habitat for their senses to stay exercised. But maybe we don’t need to be animals in a zoo to suffer from zoochosis?’
When the lesson ends and the bell rings, it’s as if an alarm has gone off everywhere. There’s a shocked pause, not the usual flap of books and papers being packed up and chairs grinding as boys bolt from the room. No one moves until Mr Wolphram has closed the book and thanked them.
They’ve never been thanked before, and they don’t know what they’ve been thanked for, but they all leave slowly, lingeringly, half wanting more, but not knowing what sort of more there might be.
When Mr Wolphram leaves the room, Danny says to Ander, ‘That was weird.’ Ander doesn’t know if Danny meant anything specifically or the whole unforeseeable hour.
The next day, it’s double English. Mr Trundley is back with his dead eyes, his bad shoes and his transparencies. The panther is forgotten, but nobody has forgotten the bars.
Tributes
There they are, Ander and Danny, in Mr Wolphram’s box of photographs, sometimes together, sometimes diluted by others, the bit-part players – everyone is someone else’s background – but never alone.
‘You’re creeping up on me, Gary, I can sense it …’ I’ve fanned the photographs out, and, as Gary approaches with his puffy breathing and the wet, blistery squeak of his oversize shoes, I slide them back into a deck before he reaches me.
‘You found anything?’ he starts. ‘If I didn’t know you better I’d say you were lingering over those a little too long, Prof … lingering over of a shoebox full of kid-snaps …’ He leans over me before I can put them away. ‘Look at those two. A right pair of Little Lord Fauntleroys. Bet the one on the left had to watch himself in the showers …’
‘Just making sure, Gary – you said it yourself – if there’s anything to find here, it’ll be in those boxes.’
He looks at me suspiciously, reluctant to go ahead of me in case I swipe something. He’s right to. He’s still eyeing the photographs and I’m still holding them.
‘See anything you like?’
Ho ho, Gary.
He puts out his hand for the pictures. He is still truffling for the child-porn he imagines he’ll find if he looks hard enough. The pictures I’m holding don’t have what he wants, but I don’t want him to see them so I try to keep them facing my chest, casually enough not to look like I’m hiding them.
‘Tomorrow, Gary, tomorrow – I think there’s nothing here for us, but tomorrow there might be … tomorrow I’ll let you finish up the lot and you can make up your own mind.’
Gary takes a step back and holds up a DVD from Mr Wolphram’s collection: ‘Catherine Deneuve,’ he says, brandishing Buñuel’s Belle de jour, ‘now there’s an interesting case: totally gorgeous woman, but I could never finish a wank to her.’
‘Thanks, Gary, that’s a fresh, nuanced take, and puts her in a very special category. Perhaps you can give a talk at the European film cl
ub at the uni or something?’
He laughs but doesn’t move. He stays there watching me. He has seen something, he just doesn’t know what it is. That’s what people don’t notice about Gary: he’s always thinking, always watching. You can turn him low, but you can’t switch him off.
‘You going to put those pics back before we lock up, Prof? Or are you intending to work on them at home?’ He leers knowingly – ironic, because know is precisely what he doesn’t.
I’ll let him unknow a little longer.
I put the photos back, close the box. We leave the room together. I’d have liked some more time with them, but it’s okay. They won’t go anywhere, even if the stories they tell are always changing, alive and yeasting up in the darkness.
The corridor is filled with light. There’s a big, flagrant sunset outside; it fills the half-circle panel of glass above the front door and sprays flames across the ceiling and the tops of the walls.
I have my hand on the door. Gary is talking. At me, to me, around me, over me: ‘The thing about working cases with posh people is you learn new words. That window thing …’ he follows my gaze up to where the light is coming in, ‘it’s actually called a fanlight, I looked it up. The bit between it and the top of the door is called a transom. Did you know that? Do you live in a house with a fanlight and transom, Prof? Fanlight and Transom … sounds like a detective duo, doesn’t it? Which of us is which? I think you’re more of a Fanlight to be honest. I’m definitely Transom.’
I start to give him a lofty appeasement-smile, but there’s no time because as Gary turns the latch and I pull open the door there’s a ripple of silver flashes. Then a dozen more, cameras all the way down the drive. Noise, shouting, questions: who, where, what, how … her name, his; our names, ranks.
We shield our faces, blink away the flashbulb burn-holes in our vision: six journalists and a handful of photographers. It’s not many, nothing compared with what’s ahead, but the surprise of it knocks us back against the door we’ve shut behind us and which is now bolt-locked. We are the last out and I can’t remember if we have the keys.
My reaction is to turn and go back in, but Gary tells me no: ‘Forward, Prof – we walk down and out and get into the car. We got nothing to give them anyway. You know the drill from the telly. Just please don’t say No Comment.’
He nudges me on by the base of my spine, down the stone steps, down the gravel path, and through the double iron gates we forgot to close behind us. The journalists part and let us through. Why they aren’t following us, I don’t know, but when I look back they’re rooted in their silhouettes, and in the fierce red of the sun they look like puppets thrown onto a fire. On the other side of the street, five neighbours are on tiptoe, craning their necks to see. One day human beings will look like giraffes from generations of peering over crowds to ogle accidents and celebrities, says Gary. They too are completely still, and look switched off for the day. Gary opens the passenger door for me and, as I turn back towards the house to lever myself, arse-first, into the seat, I notice a bunch of flowers leaned up against the gatepost next door. It’s held together at the bottom by wrinkled silver foil and looks assembled from two petrol station bouquets. I recognise the supermarket livery. It’s Zalie’s first bouquet.
It wasn’t there when we arrived. I know because I was looking. I’m always looking for them. You can map the city, any city, any town, any village and anything in-between – from edgeland to new-build estate, motorway hard shoulder to caravan park – with the bouquets and the soft toys and the plastic-covered messages. And the bridge. Wherever there’s a bridge there are tributes. It’s hard to be in this job for long without making your own map of the sorrows. Bus stops, railway stations, car parks and pubs, football terraces, street corners and the lost overgrown alleys where the nettles reach your waist and the dogs go alone to shit and find each other’s smells.
Tributes, they’re called. Shrines. When did they start? Or did they always exist? I can’t remember. I don’t think so.
I’m not saying death knew its place; I’m saying death had its place. Okay, so we organised things around it, you can’t not, but we had it zoned, as urban planners say. We divided our territories; it was part of the long truce our ancestors made with it. When I was young it was graveyards and cemeteries and crematoria: you had your grave, your headstone, your alcove for the ashes, and you left what you needed to leave there: your last words, their last words, the big unsaids and the small; your flowers or your card, your stone, your bread, some toys, your teddy. Their teddy. A candle. There’s nothing brighter than a single candle.
There was always the celeb-grave-truffling, but that, too, was contained: the bottles of booze by Oscar Wilde’s tomb, the cigarettes and joints by Jim Morrison’s. (The desperate graffiti: ‘Jim, you were my only friend!’. ‘Oscar, you set us free!’) Maybe that’s where it started, all this … what? … Display? This business of death and mourning as public property, like the Olympics or royalty.
Once upon a time, we had death localised; we’d put it in places we designed for it, in the earth or in memorial gardens. There’s the morgue, the funeral parlour, the hearse, the coffin, the urn: all there so we could clear death up and get on, wipe our daily places clean of it, so we could do the school run or go to the supermarket, the betting shop, and not have to pass the stabbing spot and think death happened here, death came here, look around can you still see the hole where someone was, then wasn’t?; so we could eat in the dining room where the father of four choked and fell face-first into his Sunday roast; so we can still use the garden where the toddler drowned in the pond reaching for the frogspawn that felt like jelly. So we can buy the house where the husband beat his wife, in the red-brick cul-de-sac show home that looks like everywhere else but isn’t; that secretly leaks dread and mute violence. That’s why we have those places: so we can claim back our places long enough to finish living in them.
We knew that we were renting the space from death. Death was the landlord who came in with the master key sometimes when we were out, for maintenance or to check the inventory, but basically left us to it until the contract was up. Now we’ve handed it all over. Death is all soft power. Look at the way it quietly moves in on us; and look at the way we let it, with our monuments and plaques and floral tributes, the teddies and Smurfs and Paddington Bears. We’re becoming its colony. It’s love-bombing us, and we’re making it cuddly and writing cards to it, saying take our streets, our homes, you’ve taken our people, take the rest, come live with us. Death has a new PR company to help it with branding: the PR company used to be called religion. Now it’s more like showbiz.
Some of these bouquets, these tributes, are discreet. They sit at the edges of the event, in nobody’s way, a handful of flowers, sometimes picked from a garden or from what’s left of a greenfield site. I like those. (Like isn’t the right word.) They register the small touch, the hit of the mortal, but they understand, too, that we need tact and distance, that we can’t keep claiming what isn’t ours.
But some of these tributes are shouty and brash and barge into the middle of it all with big-lettered messages and expensive child-size soft toys. They traipse over strangers’ grief in tuxedoes and sequins and they drink people’s tears through a drip called the news.
‘You still with us, Prof?’
Empathy, sympathy, whichever one I mean (anyway: does the one exclude the other? Is it a zero-sum game? The one feeling with, the other feeling as, it’s not possible – is it? – for a feeling to be in two places at once?): how do you know when you’ve gone past the point where you’re allowed to feel for or with someone else, accompany them some of the way before they pull out of sight into the place in their grief where they must go alone? To the point beyond sharing?
It must be possible to have a protocol for those fields of toys and flickering tea lights that sprout at the scene of the latest outrage, the newest sorrow, tomorrow’s celeb death when grief becomes a free-for-all, a big party with a pa
in-piñata made of newspaper-mâché. You’d have a code of conduct, a Grief Ombudsman. The Grief Ombudsman would say: ‘There’s nothing more dazzling than a single lamp burning at a window.’
Now it’s a field of battery-operated tea lights like you get in restaurants and pubs.
Whenever Gary is driving, to zone out his chat or his complaints about traffic, I reach for a theory and examine it. Here’s one of mine:
It’s a ripple-theory of public and private grief: an event is a stone dropped in water, and the people it affects are ripples. So far so obvious. The closer to the drop the harder the ripple: first you have the hard, tight circles, but as it reaches out you get to the wavy, intermittent rolls at the edges of the movement, it’s no longer movement; it’s just twitching at the edge, a slackening ripple of a ripple, barely a ridge in the creaming water. By then you’ve reached the victim’s neighbours’ neighbours, the newsagent, the primary school classmate.
They all want to be part of it, to take their place in the black sun of the story.
Which ripple am I, whose wave?
The stone has been dropped, but I am several rings out. I estimate six, if the first ring is lovers, parents and children, the next siblings, the one after takes in best friends, close friends, cousins and in-laws, the fifth ordinary friends and work colleagues you socialise with, the sixth …
‘That shithead on the telly.’
I don’t know who Gary’s talking about, and nor does his choice of descriptor narrow it down. But he brings me back into the here and now, that foreign country I was born in, before I can ride the thought to its end.
‘You off on one?’ he asks.
Throw Me to the Wolves Page 8
