‘I don’t eat meat. But I’ve got sandwiches packed for us.’
‘Sandwiches!’ Bright is grudgingly impressed.
They stop in a grey rainswept lay-by, where Lewis extracts a Tupperware container from the boot. ‘Would you care for one?’ he says formally, as if offering hors d’oeuvres. ‘There’s lettuce and cheese, or tomato and cheese.’
Standing by the car, eating Lewis’ slightly stale brown bread, noticing the chipmunk bulge of his cheeks and hearing the faint sound of him chewing and swallowing, Bright feels his anger shrink. The chill wind blows across his face; he tastes butter, salt, the tang of rye — and of guilt. He’s been mean to the wrong person. ‘I couldn’t use my royalties to pay my bills,’ he says, staring down at the oil-stained concrete, ‘because I gave almost all my money to charity.’
‘Why did you do that?’ Lewis looks startled.
‘Before — before —’ Bright grits his teeth, spits it out. ‘The Ledge.’ He screws the greaseproof wrapping into a small hard ball and hopes his father has filled Lewis in on this, as well as all his filial shortcomings.
A lorry thunders past too close, sucking up the air around them, sending spray over their impromptu picnic. ‘Oi!’ shouts Lewis, shaking a damp fist. ‘Stay in the lorry lane!’ He turns to Bright. ‘Well, that’s understandable. I guess you thought you didn’t need money where you were going.’
‘Exactly.’ Bright swallows hard. ‘You hit the nail on the head.’
‘Better get back inside, sir,’ says Lewis, glancing up at the clouds. ‘It’s going to bucket down.’
‘Please don’t call me sir. We’ve broken stale bread together.’ Bright winces: foot in mouth! He rushes on. ‘And maybe I can call you by your first name, instead of Lewis?’
Lewis opens the back door out of habit, closes it, and opens the front one. ‘Actually, both my names are Lewis.’
Bright winces again. ‘My god! Why did your parents do that?’
‘They thought it was distinguished.’ Lewis laughs, starts the car and merges into the traffic with the determination of someone who’s realised exactly what he’s good at. ‘They wanted me to be the chairman of a committee. Thought my name would give me a headstart.’
‘So they were trying to help? That’s nice. Crap, but nice.’ Bright stares out at the repetitive grey scenery. Already it’s banal. His heart contracts. Show me something — show me anything — I don’t already know. He’s fading fast, there’s water everywhere: lying on the fields, hanging from the sky, spraying from the cars in front so the windscreen runs with tears.
ACCIDENTS AND EMERGENCIES
GIBBY IS STANDING AT the end of his road, waiting for the bus that will take him to the train, that will take him to the airport, that will lead to him boarding a plane, which will take him away from the known. ‘I’ll run you out there,’ Mr Lux had offered. ‘We can pick up Lacey too.’
But, even though it’s a Saturday, there was an emergency to do with undelivered cables for an anti-aging cosmetics convention. ‘Bring back some samples, will you?’ shouted Mrs Lux from a living room crammed with roaring engines and the squealing of Formula-One tyres.
Over his shoulder, Mr Lux had issued vague promises of retinol while hunting for correspondence with his subcontractors. ‘Must have left it at the office,’ he’d muttered. ‘Sorry, son?’ And he’d given Gibby a ride as far as the corner.
Blue tyre marks on a frosty road, exhaust plumes hanging in the air: the signs of a father departing. But Mr Lux reverses back, lowers the window. ‘Ring us if you need funds, won’t you, son.’ He doesn’t seem entirely sure where Gibby’s going or why, but he’s always been sure about the usefulness of money. ‘Ring if there’s an emergency.’
An emergency? True, there could be another one in store for Gibby — but not if there’s any justice in the world. Two in twenty years seems unfair. Most people barely remember what happened to Gibby when he was twelve, but it’s left him like this: white-faced and shaking at a bus stop. How the hell do other people travel so far, and so often, with such insouciance?
He places his bag carefully on the bench. Cars pour along the road beside him. Where are they all going? To lunches, to family reunions, to football matches? It astonishes him, the way that other people live with such certainty, as if their lives have already been marked out and all they have to do is follow the flags.
Other people’s lives have always been a mystery to him. It’s the other things, the more hidden things, which he can see astoundingly clearly. For instance, standing under a tree, he sees the sap pulsing under the bark, pushing buds out into the wind. He can hear the tiny crack of a root six feet under asphalt. And if you stand beside him now, and look up the way he is, you might start to see the separate components of the clouds, each one an intricate woven ball of water vapour —
‘Shit!’ He swears, looks despairingly after the departing bus. ‘Oh, no. Oh shit.’ He tries to read the timetable but the plastic is scratched and graffitied: ‘Pammie for Brent’, ‘Defend Palestine’, ‘Love Jesus’.
He doesn’t usually have the nerve to address strangers, but he can’t bear the thought of having to ring his father before he’s even left his own street. He steps up to the only other person there: a gum-chewing girl in a hooded top. ‘Excuse me. Any idea when the next bus is?’
‘Every fifteen minutes on Saturdays. Are you going to the stadium?’
‘No, the t-t-train station. Then the air-p-p-port.’ He bites his lip. ‘Got a p-p-plane to catch.’
‘Where’s your luggage?’ The girl stares out at him from an overhang of grey cotton.
‘This is it.’ He picks up his bag; it feels alarmingly light. All he can remember packing is shaving foam and razor blades.
‘Cool!’ Her face flickers into momentary life. ‘I wish me and my mum could be like that. Whenever we go away it’s like a travelling bloody circus.’
‘Yes, I travel light.’ Gibby attempts a nonchalant shrug. He feels a little better. A stony-faced teenager thinks he’s cool and as long as he doesn’t lapse again — Don’t look too hard! Don’t listen too closely! Don’t succumb! — he’ll catch the next bus, and he’ll be on time for the plane.
Around him the world creaks and shuffles, turning everlastingly on its axis. A squirrel slithers up a tree, its heart beating loudly enough to shake the ground. ‘So, where are you going for your holiday?’ The girl’s voice has the same grainy timbre as the gravel, which is making infinitesimal crunching sounds as it rearranges itself under her feet.
VERY OCCASIONALLY, YOU’LL HEAR a survivor say that something good came out of an accident. Perhaps they met the love of their life in a rehabilitation unit, or they realised they had courage where before they believed they had none. A fortunate accident may sound like an oxymoron, but certainly such a thing exists. Who can resist the concept of a silver lining?
Let’s take Gibby as one example. When he was just a little younger than the studiously indifferent bus-stop girl, he suffered a very serious mishap. One terrible hour that made his ears ring for two weeks afterwards, and changed him forever.
Because of the damage to his hearing, his parents were forced to communicate through handwritten signs:
Do you still want to go to Alexander’s birthday party?
Would you like oven chips with your sausages?
It’s time you were in bed!
During that period, both silent and eternally roaring, he began to see the world with a searing clarity. This set him apart — he’d never met anyone else who saw the inanimate world in all its writhing, shimmering glory — but he’d been isolated before the accident, so this was nothing new. When the ringing died away at last, the first sound he heard was a ferocious clacking. He looked around in alarm for something out of a science-fiction comic, advancing on lethal metal feet, but saw nothing except his parents calmly eating their dinner.
‘What’s that noise?’ he said faintly.
His father reached out towards him.
‘You all right, son?’
Gibby noticed that the second hand of his father’s wristwatch was moving in time with the clacking. ‘I can hear your watch!’ He spoke very loudly, to be heard over the Omega drumbeat.
‘That’s good news.’ His father beamed; so his son wasn’t going to be deaf for the rest of his life! ‘There’s no need to shout about it, though,’ he added.
By now the dinner table had become a medley of sound. Blood oozed noisily from the steak (medium-rare, but not by design: even then Mrs Lux was easily distracted by gin and greyhound racing). The sauce bottle spluttered, gassy air exploding under its screw top. The weave of the tablecloth expanded between the water jug and the salt shaker, sounding like paper ripping. But strangest of all was the heavy thumping, slow and then slower: a progressive steadying.
‘It’s my heart,’ said Gibby in wonder. ‘My nerves and my heart. They’re settling.’
‘Eh?’ Mrs Lux looked up in vague alarm. The past two weeks had dusted her hair grey with anxiety, but she’d taken solace in a new regime that included two stiff drinks before lunch. ‘Heart pain? We’re supposed to take you straight to A&E if you have any heart pain.’
‘No, my heart’s fine.’ Gibby prodded his chest experimentally and watched a pea fall from his mother’s fork — whining like a bomb — and land in her gravy with an enormous splash. ‘I’m fine,’ he elaborated. ‘I feel normal again.’
This wasn’t really the truth. He’d never been normal, as other people would see it, and now he was even further from the state. The intensity with which he experienced the world that day — well, it isn’t always that heightened. (And now, at the bus stop, Gibby finally remembers George Eliot’s words: were his vision always so keen, he would die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.) Sometimes the state doesn’t happen for weeks; sometimes, arriving out of the blue, it’s almost a pleasure. But more often than not it’s something of an endurance test: downright frightening.
The accident, as terrible as it was and as handicapped as it’s left him, has transformed him into something extraordinary. He’s lost more than he can bear to think of — even now, eight years later, tears come to his eyes and he wrenches his mind away from it — but he’s gained the essence of the Incredible Gibby Lux.
AND SO HE STANDS inside a scratched bus shelter, seeing the world flickering behind its eyelids of wood and steel, and still he manages to have an ordinary conversation with the teenage girl about where he’s going, and for how long.
‘Cool!’ says the girl again. ‘I’ve never been there.’
‘Me neither,’ says Gibby.
‘When you get back,’ she says, cynical beyond her years, ‘you can give private coaching on how to pack light. All the ladies around here would sign up to get your secret.’ She cackles, and then her mobile rings and she retracts into her hood like a tortoise.
Saved by the bell! Gibby also busies himself with his phone. He’d been on the verge of revealing something that he might have regretted. Does anyone else need to know that the Incredible Gibby has never been away from home in his life? Not right now. For the moment, let’s keep it a secret.
CONTINENTAL BREAKFAST
BRIGHT WALKS ALONG THE hallway with his eyes half-closed, trying not to see too much. The artfully sponged apricot walls and the billowing pastel curtains make him queasy, as does the smell: lavender air freshener, rosemary chicken, and underlying everything the faint but unmistakable whiff of the Reverend’s controlling hand.
‘Are you sure you want to spend the night in a place like this?’ he’d asked Lewis as they pulled up outside.
‘Your father made reservations for us. He’s stayed here before.’ But even Lewis had looked doubtful at the sight of the pension sign fashioned out of an artist’s palette, and the blue satin bows tied around the ornamental trees.
At the top of the stairs, Bright pauses. He lays his hand on the gleaming banister, then yanks it back as if burnt; at that moment he knows that his father has, at least once, stood in this very position and put his hand on the very same spot. ‘Our Father who art in Florida,’ he says loudly, ‘hallowed be thy name.’ He tilts his head back to see through his slit-vision eyes. His reptilian gaze sees down the stairs, through the closed door, over the car park, all the way across France. ‘You’ve got me this far, thy will be done, you remote-controlling —’
Suddenly his heel slips on the carpet, and he’s careening down fifteen plush salmon-pink stairs. Bumping off walls, denting elbows, swearing at the top of his voice, and then sliding into the breakfast room as if he’s on a toboggan. ‘Morning!’ he says, slamming into a sideboard laden with food.
‘Please tell me you didn’t ride the banister.’ Lewis puts down his cup in alarm. But sitting there in a sea of empty tables and carefully artful posies, he looks pleased to see Bright, regardless of his wild entrance.
‘I slipped. They must have been up at dawn polishing the carpet.’ Bright is wrist-deep in a giant bowl of cereal. ‘Rice Krispies?’ he offers, shaking them out of his sleeve.
Lewis emits a strange rumbling sound.
‘Is that a suppressed laugh?’ asks Bright. ‘I suppose my father put “No laughing” in the job description, along with “Willingness to spend nights at tasteless pensions”.’
Lewis makes the sound again. ‘He didn’t tell me you were funny.’
‘I’m practically a mute when I’m with him. He brings out the worst in me.’
‘Fathers have a way of doing that.’ This is probably as close as Lewis can come to indiscretion.
Bright sways in front of the cereals. ‘Look, French Weetabix! Talk about globalisation.’
But Lewis appears to be a sandwich man through and through. He’s busy cutting a baguette into squares: no easy task, considering the bluntness of his knife and the extreme crustiness of the French bread. ‘Should have brought my Swiss army knife,’ he says, frowning with concentration.
‘Have you noticed there are two identical Monet prints on the wall behind you? An ironic gesture, do you think?’ Stepping back to appreciate the effect of matching haystacks, Bright catches his foot in a chair leg and falls backwards. His breakfast bowl soars, handfuls of green grapes and melon balls fly, and he lands with a loud clatter amongst the fire irons. ‘Shit. Bloody, buggery hell.’ Wild-eyed, he lies on his back surrounded by fruit salad. Already, he’s fearing how the day will end.
‘You all right?’ Lewis pulls him out of the fireplace and dusts him down.
‘I didn’t sleep much. I’m always clumsy when I haven’t slept.’ He picks an apple cube off his boot and drop-kicks it into a tureen of potpourri. ‘You know what?’ He sinks down at Lewis’s crumb-strewn table. ‘The rooms are too big.’
‘Too big?’ Lewis stares at the low ceiling, his trained politeness battling with his innate honesty. ‘To be honest,’ he admits, ‘I think it’s pretty cramped in here.’
‘It’s relative, like most things.’ Bright sighs, making baguette flakes flutter over the cloth. ‘I prefer being able to stretch out my arms and touch a wall on both sides. That’s what makes me feel at home. Then I can sleep.’
Lewis nods, almost as though he understands. ‘Look, we’ve got a long drive ahead. Maybe you should have some coffee?’ And with this word, as if it’s an Open Sesame, the wall beside their table springs apart and a face appears.
Bright shrieks and leaps in his chair. ‘How — how’d you do that?’
‘You want coffeeee?’ Framed by the serving hatch, her young rosy face is picture-perfect: dazzling smile, glossy hair. ‘I’ll be there secondarily.’
‘Now I see why my father regularly returns.’ Bright bites into a discarded crust.
‘Well, how about you?’ Lewis does a tactful swerve. ‘Anyone special in your life?’
Bright thinks back. How many girls had there been hovering around the ledge that night? Was there anyone capable of steadying his heart and raising his hopes? Someone who might have made him edge back instea
d of forwards? ‘No one in particular.’ His teeth squeak loudly on the bread. ‘I guess I avoid it. It’s hard to write when you’re in love.’
Once again, as if cued by a key word, the waitress appears beside them. This time she’s full-length: short navy dress, tiny white apron, long slender legs, everyone’s idea of a perfect French maid. ‘Excuse me, sir. Your cup?’
‘Oh, sorry!’ Bright holds out his cup and knocks over the pepper grinder, which tumbles against the sugar bowl. ‘Shit, sorry. Again.’ Scooping up sugar cubes, he glances apprehensively across the table — but no, his father isn’t there ready with a reprimand, rolling his eyes first at the maid and then at the ceiling as if to say, ‘God, what have You landed me with?’
The waitress giggles, pours coffee and straightens the tablecloth, brushing her hand lightly over Bright’s knee before she leaves.
‘Sure you’re all right?’ Lewis cuts a slab of butter and places it carefully on a slice of tomato. ‘You seem a bit jumpy.’
‘I’m not used to being around so many people.’ Bright drinks his coffee in one gulp, feels it enter his veins and colour them black like ink. He notices Lewis’ confusion at the word many. ‘That is, I’m not used to being around more than one person at a time. And by one person I mean myself.’
‘It must be a lonely job writing books.’ Lewis chews in loud contemplation. ‘All those hours by yourself. A bit like driving, in fact. Are you even old enough to write a book?’
‘A seven-year-old child can write a book,’ says Bright, quoting his agent, Teddy McPhee, The Vulture, famed for swooping on slush piles and pulling out international hits. ‘Half a dozen monkeys with typewriters could write a library of books. Though —’ (quoting Borges now, a distinct step up from Teddy McPhee) — ‘one immortal monkey would suffice.’
Suicide Club, The Page 16
