He was sitting at the table, smoking. A candle flickered in front of him. He didn’t often smoke.
‘I can leave you alone if you want,’ I said.
He pulled out a chair and threw me his sweater.
‘I loved him,’ he said.
‘I know.’
‘And I keep listening to messages he left me. I just want to hear his voice. I feel like I’m going mad.’
I reached for a cigarette and lit it.
‘I told him a few days before all this happened,’ he said. ‘Simply told him what I wanted. What I wanted for us. Asked him why he couldn’t make that jump, why he couldn’t be with me. I knew he loved me. What was he so frightened of, Ell? Why couldn’t he do it? Why couldn’t he fucking say, Yes? Maybe all this would have been different then.’
I let his questions evaporate into the darkness, where they joined the million other unanswered questions that hung above Manhattan that night; burdensome, and irredeemable; ultimately cruel. No one had answers.
The breeze seemed cooler as it filtered through the shutters. I emptied the box of photographs onto the floor and we edited for two hours until we found the one we all agreed on, the one that looked most like him, as we all saw him: smiling, with the pool at the Raleigh shimmering behind. It was the trip when he stole my pen with turquoise ink. Just last February. When we met in Miami for some winter sun. The most expensive kind of sun.
We chose the words and I went down to the print shop and made some photocopies and the man looked on respectfully. He’d seen hundreds of these and I was just one more. When I finished he wouldn’t take my money. The gesture made me cry.
I needed to see it for myself, and by myself, give the other two a rest because they’d seen too much, and so I went alone. Just walked south, kept going to where they used to be, marking the skyline. There was no preparation. I hid behind dark glasses and separated myself from hell.
Have you seen my husband?
My daddy was a waiter
My sister’s called Erin
My wife and I just got married.
She’s missing . . .
The downtown walls were plastered with verse and words and pictures and prayers, and they stretched into the distance like a grotesque fable, one of unprepared despair. People moved along slowly reading, and when a fireman or rescue worker passed by there’d be a moment of applause, but they wouldn’t look up because they knew. They knew there’d be no survivors. Had known before everyone else. And they wouldn’t look up because they were so tired and hadn’t slept, and of course they couldn’t sleep, they were surrounded by photographs saying, Find me, find me. How could – how would – they ever sleep?
I found a space next to a woman who had worked in the restaurant. She looked nice, she was a grandmother, and I put him next to her. I never expected people to find him, not really. I simply wanted people to look at him and say, He looks like a nice man, I wish I’d known him. Someone stood at my shoulder.
‘My brother,’ I said, smoothing the crease that crooked his smile.
It was late. Latter than I usually went out, and I sat at the bar and faced bottles and optics, and a distorted reflection of myself in between. Behind me were quiet stragglers; ones left thinking and drinking, no pause in between. In front of me, whiskey.
I didn’t know this part of town, could be anonymous in this part of town and moments before, I’d come back from the bathroom with an extra button undone. It felt crass, I felt awkward, but I hoped for a pick-up, a date or something, but I was out of practice, out of touch with a world like that. Cut off from a world that required behaviour like that. A man looked over. He smiled, I smiled, my standards were dropping. I paid the tab and headed out into the sobering air. My heart tore. I’d had no one for so long.
I walked the block, passing couples, a dog walker, a runner too. All had direction; me, aimless. I turned up a tree-lined street, its symmetry halted by the red and white lights of a neighbourhood bistro.
It was warm inside, and smelt of garlic and coffee. The owner was cheery. I was his only customer, he might have been waiting to go home, but he didn’t show it. He brought over my coffee, enquired about my evening, gave me a piece of Torta di Nonna. ‘You won’t be disappointed,’ he said. I wasn’t. He handed me the arts section of the weekend Times. Kind.
The soft bell above the door rang. I heard a brief conversation and the subsequent groan of the espresso machine. I looked up. A man. He looked at me. I think he smiled. I looked down, pretended to read. He pulled out a chair and sat down behind me. I wanted another coffee but I felt wired, didn’t want to get up, could feel him behind me. The man went to the counter and paid his bill. Don’t go. Look up. I listened for the sound of the bell. Nothing. Footsteps towards me.
‘You look how I feel,’ he said, his face tired, sad. He handed me another coffee, a baci perched on the saucer.
We barrelled through his front door, a heaving mass of peeling clothes and reaching hands, and we crawled from floor to sofa to bed, but slowed at bed. The startling intimacy of perfume and photos, this once-shared life, stemmed our need, and that’s when he said, ‘We can stop if you like.’ No stop. His mouth tasted of cinnamon and sugar. Coffee too.
I unbuttoned his shirt. His skin felt cool and pimpled as I ran my fingers across his chest and down the hairline of his stomach. I stopped at the elastic of his pants. He sat up awkward, shy even. His cock between us, hard and ready. I held it against the fabric. Outlined the shape with my fingers, grasped it. He didn’t move, no thrust, waiting to see what I would do. I lifted his hips and peeled off the white shorts. I bent down. He tasted of soap.
I buried my head in the pillows as my cunt clasped around his fingers, as they slid deep in me, wet and fast, thrusting fast until his cock took over, until he rolled me over and faced me. This sad face, this gentle, beautiful face that had no name. He bent down and kissed me, kissed her. I reached for his hair, lank and wet. I grabbed his mouth, sucked his tongue. He pushed me into the sheets, my knees tight around his ribs clinging to this shared moment, faster shunting as he moved deeper in me, expelling all that had been buried, all that had been hidden, faster fucking, until I felt the surge of energy and reached for him, this stranger, and bit hard on his shoulder as my sound – as his sound – filled the room, and brought back life to a bed, coated in ache.
Five o’clock. Life was beginning outside. I rolled over, exhausted; felt sore between my legs. I dressed quietly in the twilight and watched him sleep. I would leave no note. I made my way to the door.
‘This wasn’t nothing,’ he said.
‘I know.’ I went back and held him. This was breath.
The days spread out before me, interminable, senseless hours, and I went to a French café where I wasn’t known and where I didn’t have to deflect the ‘Any news?’ with polite ‘Not yet’s. I sat in the window and watched life pass, watched it head Uptown. I saw three young women walking arm in arm and they were laughing, and I realised that I hadn’t seen that in days; it looked so strange.
I wrote there. Wrote the column and wrote about the Lost. I wrote about the flowers at every fire station, piled three, five high, and the candles that never went out; prayers burning through despair, because it was still early days and you never knew, but of course most people did. People knew as they lay alone at night, that this was the beginning, the raw beginning that was to be their Present, their Now, their Future, their Memory. I wrote about the sudden embraces in the middle of shops, and the funerals that appeared everyday for fire-fighters and cops, funerals that stopped the streetflow with a volley of salutes and tears. I wrote about the lost cityscape as I sat on our favourite bench along the promenade by Brooklyn Bridge; the place we went to to think and where we imagined what our lives would be three, five, ten years hence.
But most of all I wrote about him – now called Max – my brother, our friend, missing now for ten days. And I wrote about what I’d lost that morning. The witness of my soul, my shadow
in childhood, when dreams were small and attainable for all. When sweets were a penny and god was a rabbit.
Nancy went back to LA to work. She wasn’t ready, but they called her back and I said she’d never be ready so she had to go.
‘I’m thinking of coming back,’ she said.
‘To here, New York?’
‘No. To England. I miss it.’
‘It’s not perfect.’
‘Seems so after this.’
‘This could happen anywhere,’ I said. ‘Nowhere’s safe. This will happen again.’
‘But I miss you lot,’ she said. ‘The everyday.’
‘You’ll feel different when you get that holster back on.’
‘Idiot,’ she said.
‘So come home,’ I said as I held her. ‘We need you.’
And as she opened the front door and headed down the stoop she turned and put on her sunglasses. ‘I’ll be all right, won’t I?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Flying. I’ll be all right?’
‘You’ll always be all right,’ I said.
She smiled. Fear was catching. Even the immune were suffering.
We went out to eat that night, just Charlie and I, the first and only night since I’d got there. We went to their place, to Balthazar, and we sat where they always sat, and people were discreet but still asked how we were and Charlie said, ‘We’re OK, thanks.’
We ate from platters of fruits de mer and drank Burgundy and ate steak frites and drank more Burgundy and did as they used to do, and we laughed and got drunk, until the restaurant thinned out and we were allowed to stay in the corner like the Forgotten, as they cleared around us and told jokes about the evening. And that’s when he told me. So unexpectedly. Told me about that room in Lebanon.
‘You can hold on to anything, Elly, to make you carry on.’
‘So what did you hold on to?’
Pause.
‘The sight of a lemon tree.’
He proceeded to tell me about the small window high up in his room, no glass, just open to the elements, his only source of light. He would climb up to it and hold himself in the draught of fresh air, the scented fresh air that made him feel less forgotten. He couldn’t hold on to the wall for long, and would drop back down into the darkness, where the smells were then his; humiliating and dirty, clinging.
A few days after they had taken his ear, he awoke very late in the afternoon and climbed up to the window and saw that a small lemon tree had been brought into the yard. And in the fading light, the lemons seemed to glow and they were beautiful, and his mouth watered, and there was a breeze and he could smell coffee, perfume, even mint. And for a moment he was all right because the world was still there, and the world out there was good, and when the world was good, there was hope.
I reached for his hand. It was cold.
‘I have to go back to England,’ I said. ‘Come with me.’
‘Not without him,’ he said.
I knew they’d want something with his DNA in case they found him, found something of him. I went into the bathroom before I left and bagged his toothbrush and a hairbrush, but not his favourite brush, in case he came back, you see; I left that on the side next to his aftershave, next to an old copy of Rugby World. I sat on the edge of the bath and felt so guilty that I was to go home and leave him there, but I had to go; had to go and bridge the distance that now separated my stricken parents. And so I left Charlie there, in the house we spent months working on, the house with the bird’s nest and the ailanthus tree and the old gold coin we’d found whilst digging out the garden. I left Charlie there to man the phone line, to make calls to the Embassy, and to be there when they called. Charlie, the old hand at trauma; Charlie, the unexpected proof that life can sometimes turn out all right.
It is all so much smaller. The shops have gone, wiped clean except from memory. The deli, the newsagent, the butcher with its sawdust floor, and the smart shoe shop we never went in, they’ve all gone. I don’t feel sad, feel nothing, simply nothing. I drive along, signal left and turn into the street where we all began.
I don’t stop outside, but a few houses before, and I see the swish of saris now, the changing constellation of immigration. I imagined that I would walk up the path, the path that cut through the grass and the flowerbeds, and I would stand in front of the door and ring the bell. ‘I used to live here,’ I would say and there would be smiles and an invitation inside, and maybe even a cup of tea, and I would tell them stories of our life and tell them how happy we were, and they might look at each other and think, I hope their joy and luck rub off on us too.
There is a loud knock on my window. I look into the face of a man I don’t know. He seems angry. I lower the window.
‘Are you going yet? ’Cause I live here and I want to park.’
I say nothing to this man. I don’t like him and so I say nothing. I turn the ignition and pull away. I roll slowly down the street, until I see it. I stop outside. The wall has gone, garden gone, and a car is parked where the flowerbeds used to blossom. There is a porch, and I can see coats suspended in the condensation. I am a stranger. I drive on. Nothing is as it should be.
I look at my watch. Late. I am cold. Waiting for house lights to retire. The alleyway smells the same; I am alone. I see the movement of a fox. It comes closer – they’re urbanised now – I kick stones its way and it saunters off, unafraid but irritated. I look over the fence. As I do, the last light disappears. Now I feel nervous; definition of shadows all around. Is that a man? I move against the old gate. Blood pounding. Move on, move on, move on. I hear his footsteps recede on the gravel. I count the silence that remains.
I lift the latch easily and secure the gate with a brick. The small torch beam is surprisingly strong, and the jumble of junk at the bottom of the garden appears untouched, apart from the addition of fox faeces and an old trainer. Half a chicken carcass.
I dig through moist leaves until I hit the dirt. I follow the line down from the slatted fence and measure a hand’s-width away. I scoop out handfuls of earth until I feel the chilly sensation of tin. I pull it free and wipe the lid clean: Biscuit assortment (we ate them all).
I put nothing back, don’t cover my tracks. It will be blamed on a fox. I want to get away from here. I kick away the brick and secure the gate. I stride quickly away. Darkness enfolds the wake of my presence. I was never there.
The Polaroid is surprisingly clear in the early morning light. The girl who became a boy. I am smiling, (I am hiding). The Christmas of my rabbit. Leave something behind, he had said.
I reach for my coffee. I put on another layer and look out over the familiar of my adult world. I unfold his letter. The scrawl of his fifteen-year-old handwriting grips my throat – to my eyes, a jumble of ciphers. To free, to explain.
I arrived as a grey afternoon chill descended upon the station and heralded my arrival with the promise of nothing. The station was quiet; only one other passenger disembarked with me, a passenger who carried his home on his back and who strode up the hill with the practised gait of a professional walker. I let him go ahead.
I’d told no one I was coming, not even Alan, and had simply picked up a local cab outside the station. In truth I’d wanted to stay in London, away from everything that said, This is Joe; for the views and the smells and the trees were all him as they were also me, intertwined as we were in this landscape, forged and rooted and held.
I asked to be dropped at the top of the roadway by the old bar gate, by the mossy indented word TREHAVEN that we’d first seen twenty-three years ago, when we were poised on the edge of adventure, me with a timid yearning to start my life again, him with a broken heart that had never healed.
It was cold and I wore too little, but the cold felt good and it cleared my head, allowed me to stop and listen to the faint drilling of a woodpecker. And as the hill took me down towards the house, the space he’d left seized me and something somewhere in that space whispered, He’s still here. I heard it
as the hill propelled me towards the silence of meal times and the masked pain, and the open photo albums no longer stored away in musty drawers. He’s still here, it whispered as my pace quickened and my tears fell, still here, until I started to run.
They were in the kitchen, all three of them, drinking tea and eating sponge cake. It was Nelson, Arthur’s guide dog, who noticed me first, the little chocolate-brown Labrador who’d become his eyes a year ago when mine could no longer commit full time. He bounded towards the door and barked, and I saw Arthur smile because he knew the bark, knew what it meant, and my mother and father got up and ran towards me, and everything seemed strangely normal that first moment when I arrived. The cracks appeared only after I went up to my room.
I hadn’t heard her behind me; the weight she’d lost made her tread lighter, or maybe I was distracted by the sudden emergence of a photograph on my dresser, a photo of me and Joe at Plymouth Navy Days, when we were young, a photo I hadn’t seen in almost fifteen years. He was wearing a sailor’s hat and I had wanted to laugh, but it hadn’t been placed in irony, and so I didn’t. My mother picked it up and looked at it – ran her fingers across his face, ran them across her brow.
‘We were so lucky that he was ours,’ I said.
My mother carefully replaced the photograph.
Silence.
‘I’ve never been a crazy person, Elly, not hysterical. I’ve been rational all my life and so when I say, he’s not dead, it’s not wishing or hoping, it’s rational; it’s clear thought.’
When God Was a Rabbit Page 21
