All the Rage

by A. L. Kennedy

  She breathed in sweetish, Middle Europeanish air – a sense of distant mountains about it and of overpriced market-place snacks closer at hand. The lane around her was either medieval, or a convincing reconstruction of bombed-flat houses, which had restored smoothed lintels, stooping doorways and colourful shutters, ornately impractical locks. What would once have been flammable and squalid accommodation, if not rubble heaps, had been turned into something charming – slightly too self-conscious and with ground floors mainly dedicated to the sale of alarming artisan ceramics, but cute. Relatively cute.

  Dorothy padded along in her holiday shoes, feeling uncluttered and free from the need of garish mugs. Or lace, there was also lace. And contagious-looking biscuits. She believed it had been a good move on her part to avoid the dull, muzzy bustle around the hotel’s buffet arrangements with morning strangers. She didn’t like unknown quantities first thing – they were too much. Unsolicited early conversations made her tetchy as a maiden aunt facing down a squirrel.

  Which was a good phrase. She must remember and say it for someone she knew. Although without a context it might fall flat.

  Someone known was required for a good breakfast – either that, or solitude and culinary excitement. She’d liked the period a while ago when European breakfasts cut a mysterious dash with plates of unnameable meats and pure, wild colours of substances in jars and sealed little punnets of things that might be for on your foreign-looking bread, or for in the foreign-tasting coffee that would race beside your heart and rub it up into unnatural states, but you’d let it – far from home and a special occasion, you’d let it, you’d give the beats your leave to skip away on you.

  These days, hotels practically everywhere had the same eggs, sausages, bacon, hash browns, French toast, the customary Anglo-American harbingers of obesity and doom. Dorothy continued to long for regional variations and mistakes – dishes of weird broth, unpardonable chicken sausages, potatoes to which sad accidents must have happened, strange grains and badly transfigured eggs. She sought out oddities whenever she could in order to encourage their continuance.

  On her way back she would buy some of the worrying biscuits. She briefly wished her phrasebook included the question, ‘Excuse me, do these taste bizarre, or have a disturbing texture, in which case I’ll take several?’

  Her banana had made for a bland, albeit nourishing, start and had not been – as it turned out – a quite adequate preparation for so much immaculate paintwork and so many small, deep windows full of burnished and horribly pointless ornaments. It all made her vaguely inclined towards vandalism or at least shouting and so she ducked off as quickly as she could to follow a footpath that dipped down a slope and abandoned the houses so it could cuddle the shade beside a stream. Eventually, the path thinned and become a chalky track. The mild breeze was grassy at this point, warm, and was flavoured with a sense of water, soaked leaves, secretive motion. Pheasants rose and battered up to the left of Dorothy, their tails straggling. As they laboured higher, they called out in stupid alarm: u-wa-u-wa-u-wa. Further on, they were less uneasy and merely let her drive them ahead, neatly trotting birds with the silhouettes of little fat men on horseback. Then they bustled off into undergrowth, rustles, nothing.

  When the stream pooled and calmed under trees, she halted, relaxed.

  There was an earthy and sandy bank, silent for footfalls and cool.

  Dorothy had no precise idea which type of trees were stretched above her. Something in the style of birches.

  She just stood.

  It was clear there were fish in the pool, although she wasn’t close enough to see, because a Labrador was wading about shin-deep and chasing them. The animal was avid: pouncing and stalking, tail wagging as it combed and quartered every hollow. Occasionally its belly dabbed down into what Dorothy guessed might be a pleasant chill. Beyond the damp and shadows, sunlight was sharpening overhead, already suggesting the need for reliefs.

  Dorothy considered removing her shoes and paddling.

  Perhaps once the dog had gone.

  The animal seemed very busy, though, and jolly and disinclined to leave. As she watched, it snapped at the water, pressed its head full under and then shook itself free again, empty-mouthed, in a big startle of light that arced all round before landing in rings and sparks. Then it studied the wavelets again, entirely satisfied with the futility of its search. The pursuit was perfect, a twitchy and bright excitement. Finding, getting, that wasn’t required.

  Dorothy tried deciding – experimentally – that it wouldn’t be a bad thing to wait here and see the dog being happy and have the shelter of dense-leaved, if unidentified, trees for a good while. Until dark, even. That could be a prudent choice.

  Except then the dog’s owner – she had to assume some kind of link between the two – began shouting what sounded like, ‘Ankle, Ankle . . .’ and came into view: middle-aged guy, wading along and naked except for faded and overly short denim shorts and with a balding ponytail, as if such a thing should be possible in a kind and proper world.

  ‘Ankle! Ankle!’ And, at this, the hunt stopped and there was a whiskery sneeze of delight and a paddling trot from the dog to bring it gladly beside its master. Then both glanced over at Dorothy, the man’s expression implying that he – creepy, scraggle-armed and too undressed, his browned and hairy little stomach pouched shamefully over his waistband – he belonged in this place and was here every morning, and what the hell was she doing, intruding on the scene and peering at him and his beloved Ankle as if they were not quite right?

  She didn’t outstare him. She was aware, in fact, that she’d started to blush and therefore had a kind of admission of guilt rising on her cheeks and neck, as if she’d intended to be here and to solicit bad interactions that ought to stay nameless. Like Ankle.

  Who would call any pet Ankle?

  The leaves sniggered hotly at her back as she withdrew, retraced her steps.

  This left her alone with the path again and steering for town, because there was nowhere else aside from genuine hiking routes that led into the southern hills, for which maps were available from Reception. She didn’t yet have a map, even though part of coming here had involved semi-plans for vigorous climbs and then worthwhile views accompanied by fruit, or bread and local sausage, regional cheese, decanted tap water from the metal bottle she’d packed with her boots and the largely superfluous compass intended to give her efforts an adventurous gloss. Every route was clearly and frequently signposted. There were inns every ten or twelve miles with rustic verandas and hygienic toilets. This was in no way a wilderness.

  Possibly a wasteland. Probably. But not a wilderness.

  In the pretty high street the pretty restaurants were crowded with lunching tourists. The tourists were not pretty, they were noisy and bewildering. Dorothy pressed open doors on clique after clique of happy tables, threaded herself under terrace parasols, found no comfortable space, found no space comfortable.

  She wasn’t hungry, anyway. That banana. Sustaining.

  And the sunlight was making her head throb.

  In the end, it turned out she could sit on the dark side of a repellent municipal statue, because no one else wanted to be there. Or because no one else was currently aware of its – she might term them – evasive charms. Others had been here, however: at the base of the thing, in under a mossy confusion of mythical tails and feet, was a shallow trough. Small-denomination coins lay calmly winking and shivering under its water, where they’d presumably been thrown: moderate, circular hopes or thanks for good luck, coming safely back, going safely home, finding contentment. She trailed her hand into the trough, made ripples and then stilled them. She lifted her fingers and licked them. They had no particular flavour: no hint of metal, no hint of luck. They were just colder than her lips.

  She kept the imprint – index finger, second finger – in between her tongue and the roof of her mouth and let it be a reason for not speaking when she got up and searched again for an empty seat, fo
und one, pointed to a laminated menu where it listed types of coffee, then sipped and paused and sipped and paused and then mimed – thumb snibbed against index finger in a tiny beak – the scribble of a bill.

  She paid.

  She scraped back her chair with a motion which seemed to her childish and liable to suggest that her limbs were uncivilised and out of scale. She felt it must surely be visible that she didn’t share the range of interests and activities tucked up nicely inside the other visitors. She was trying to kill a day, make it go. Tomorrow she would have to try and kill another. It was making her feel brutal. It was worsening the headache.

  Back at the hotel there would be, she was certain, no change and only another instalment of defeat.

  She realised once more, kept realising, as if the information wouldn’t stick, realised again how likely it was that someone you’d given the option of leaving, someone you’d said was free to go, that someone might not discover a way to come back. They might not have been looking for one, might always have intended the space that they’ve spent away should become permanent. It wasn’t away for them any more – it was a different here. And someone might have got confused about who really left and what was lost and what broken and where the source of all the pain was; in absence, or presence, or alternative positions allowed to stay unexplored.

  It was unclear.

  And the streets were exhausted quickly, turned her constantly back to the unavoidable hotel.

  A cool shower. A lie-down. Those wouldn’t be bad things. She could appreciate them. If you operated at that level, it was relatively easy to be content.

  Still, the foyer was slightly vicious in the way that it tumbled her up to the lift, hungry and amused, tilted her downhill so she couldn’t help but rush to the room, to its door and the opening, the wide opening and the swing of revealed information: here was the wardrobe, here was the shuttered window and slivers of light, here was her case on the stand for cases, here was the bedside table, here was the bed.

  Here was a different here and a different bed.

  Here was the bed.

  Here was her headache slowing, relenting so unexpectedly that it made her close to tearful.

  Here was the chair with shoes beneath it, neat, and a more untidy slump of clothes: shirt, jeans, underpants, socks, the glimmer of a metal wristwatch also removed.

  Here was the bed.

  Here was the relenting bed.

  ‘I got tired.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Here was the space around the bed, a little uncrossable and surprised.

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘Where were you?’

  Here was the bed where he was sitting up at the sound of her, sitting up like Sunday morning, sitting up like ages and ages ago when it made her smile. He had the covers tucked under his arms and he did not look as if he’d been sleeping, or resting since he arrived. He looked as if he’d decided the weight of talking to her would be eased if he was undressed, but now he was reconsidering.

  Dorothy frowned and then stopped, because otherwise she would appear to be unhelpful. ‘I was in the town – village.’ She went to sit on the bed, but then didn’t. Since it was, to a degree, altered, she had no longer been there before and was nervous of it.

  ‘I did call when they told us the flight was . . . I knew you’d have your phone off.’

  ‘I had my phone off.’

  ‘I know.’

  They both understood that uncomfortable calls she has to answer make her turn off her phone pre-emptively. It was irritating. Neither of them would have denied that.

  ‘So I landed in this . . . I’d forgotten how much I like it here. It was a good idea. Good idea. And thanks for letting me know. We can have some days. Really. Clever. I wouldn’t have thought . . . but you did . . .’ He lay down flat and blinked at the ceiling as if he were an invalid, an injured party, a boy overcome by his surroundings. ‘I had to catch a train . . . They landed us in the wrong place. Then a train.’ He disappeared his arms under the quilt and tucked it neat to his chin from inside, from in the dark and hiding. ‘A train . . .’ It was too hot to be so covered.

  Dorothy turned, sat on the floor with the back of her head leaned against the mattress, against the modest shifts of motion that told her he was there. She told him, ‘I wish I hadn’t . . . I wish I . . .’

  ‘I didn’t want you to think that I wasn’t coming. I was going to. The pause wasn’t about that.’

  She didn’t tell him anything.

  ‘You worry. You get anxious.’

  She didn’t tell him anything.

  ‘And I get . . .’

  She didn’t tell him anything.

  ‘I worry, too . . . You’ve seen and . . . I’m . . . I wanted you to know I was on my way.’

  There was a small ruffle of bed sounds and he reached down and pressed her shoulder and the back of his hand was brushed untidily against her cheek and then he formed the touch again and moved through it again and concentrated and she could feel his purpose as tender, serious, frightened.

  They had broken things, the pair of them. Unexpected damage had occurred, and they’d thought they would have managed better after their years of practice, but they hadn’t.

  She leaned into his hand, kissed his fingers. ‘I got scared.’

  ‘I know.’ She heard him breathe out and pictured a column of something, some living trouble, pluming above his face. ‘And when you . . . That was . . . I don’t think . . .’

  This at the moment was peaceful. No breakages.

  ‘I wanted to hear your voice.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  And there is a way of saying this which means we can’t continue and a way of saying it which means we can keep on and manage and we can be all right.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry, too.’

  Knocked

  HIS EARLIEST ADULT experience – he wakes up in a hospital wearing stiff clothes, cold clothes. Also there is a some kind of mistake in his head. He is not alarmed, the boy, only puzzles in the cloth- and sour-tasting darkness of the ward until he knows it is a ward and that something has gone wrong and put him here.

  ‘Nurse?’

  The boy does not say this. He would never have thought to call a nurse: his character is undemanding and, besides, he cannot imagine needing anything beyond perhaps an explanation for the maritime rush which is catching at his ears and this dizzy, laden weakness of his thinking.

  ‘Nurse?’

  It is this word that woke him, he believes – its repetition. First word of his alternate life.

  ‘Nurse?’

  Footfalls consent to be summoned and close on him, as fast as irritation – heel-thumps before toe-thumps and a squeak each time they argue with the floor.

  The nurse’s shape halts three beds down from the boy and interrupts the glimmers of a window in a way that seems peculiarly shocking.

  ‘What do you want, then?’

  She is nothing like the boy’s mother, has a voice which is entirely strange to him, and sharpened – it sews through the air, passes over him, then on. He hears it ting against the farthest wall.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Can I have a glass of water?’ The melody of the question is indecisive, apologetic.

  ‘No.’

  And the nurse-shape begins to leave again, even more quickly, while the boy wonders if the other child, the thirsty one – who sounds like a boy, too – will maybe die soon from a lack of water. Water does seem such a plain and reasonable requirement that only some fatal intention would allow it to be denied.

  Lying still and heavier than he has ever been, the boy recoils very slightly within his unfamiliar pyjamas. He believes, almost at once, that these are part of the belongings of some previous small patient who has died while on the ward, odds and ends reused for the benefit of others and no further trace remaining. There are numerous, uncountably numerous, places where the boy’s skin is being touched by the dead
-boy cloth. The jacket cuffs nuzzle clammily against his wrists. It is very likely his arse is where a dead-boy’s arse has been, and moreover his parts which are meant to be secret are comfortably settled in these trousers, perhaps because this is how the dead-boy’s used to rest. His mickey where another mickey was. A smoky rush seems to rummage across him as he considers this and his left hand sneaks beneath the covers to make sure of himself and feel that all is well.

  The hand seems slower and more clever than it used to be.

  ‘Nurse?’ The boy tries his own mouth with the word and it emerges much as he’d expected.

  ‘Yes.’ She has paused because he has spoken and this makes him proud, but wary of coming responsibilities. ‘Yes, what do you want?’

  ‘Can I have a glass of water?’ He isn’t thirsty, only curious.

  ‘Yes.’

  And the water is brought to him, shining with guilt, and set between his palms when he has raised himself through a wavering and thickened space. The boy holds his drink with monumental care – has to concentrate on gripping, as if he might soon forget how. He clings to the smoothness of the glass, to someone else’s want, sips and swallows loudly and with a kind of grin.

  ‘Why does my head hurt?’ Because it does – the left side of his skull and even his cheek are singing with a weird, dark awareness, something exhilarating.

  ‘A horse trod on you.’

  This seems not unlikely.

  He tucks the water inside himself, understands it is coiled now in a blue shape that perhaps half-fills him. ‘Thank you.’ He is polite. His father and mother would expect that of him. Then he slides back down to be flat, the water lapping and giggling as he moves.

  A horse.

  Yes.

  There were horses.

  There were lessons with horses to make the boy confident and able to sit up straight, a commanding presence in later life. A premeditated Christmas present which had started in January: ten o’clock on Saturday mornings, an hour with himself and various older, wilier boys in a wide, high barn – peaty and sawdusty stuff underfoot and everywhere alive with a humid and dangerous reek. Frost beyond the walls, but the boy hot, the boy feverish with horses.