A Station on the Path to Somewhere Better

by Benjamin Wood

  She knows that I’ve been speaking to somebody lately, but she doesn’t know it’s you. I’ve mentioned Dennis Alma and his grief group at the 10th Street Church so often that she must think I’m close to saying grace at mealtimes, and I can tell she’s mindful not to interfere in my progress, whatever has inspired it. She has seen me writing in my notebooks and seems to have assumed that it’s some therapeutic exercise I’ve been allocated by a new psychiatrist, which isn’t so far from the truth. This—my coming here and talking to you—is not a secret I am keeping from her, it’s a privacy I’ve yet to share. Alisha is sure to understand the distinction. There’s nothing I have said to you that she doesn’t know already. Once I’ve finished here and packed the last of the cassettes into the box with all the others, I’ll go straight home and tell her all about them. But these tapes belong to you, and whoever you decide to play them to is your decision.

  It has been about five months since I began all this. The routine has given me a sense of purpose, a different compass by which to plot the course of my days—I’ll miss it. On nights when I’m not tutoring in Queens or somewhere else, I’ve been going up to meet Alisha in her studio—she’s co-letting a place above a paint and hardware store on 9th and 21st, for lack of an alternative, and I’ve grown used to the subway ride, the short stroll in the dusky light, the cutting rain, and now the snow. She buzzes me up and I climb the stairs to her workspace full of stand lights, paper screens, and thrift-store furniture, to lie back on her fainting couch with a mechanical pencil and a notepad until she’s ready to leave. On Thursday evenings, I sit mutely for an hour with Dennis Alma and his group, then walk down to my storage locker just a few blocks south of the church. This is where I’ve been recording everything I write for you. I have a cumbersome stereo tape deck and a microphone here, ten packets of unused Maxwell cassettes (not as hard to find as you’d expect), and for the bargain price of $179.95 a month, I’m guaranteed no scrutiny from the outside world, no interruptions.

  It’s nothing much. An aluminium-sided room, ten feet square, but it means more than that to me. Perhaps it’s just another place to hide. I can come and go whenever I please—there’s always someone manning the reception desk—and I’ve organised the space to serve my needs: a Turkish rug, a folding table, an armchair, and a reading lamp. In the metal cabinet, you’ll find nearly three hundred pairs of antique spectacles, individually wrapped in plastic bags and boxed with tissue paper—you might not share my interest in them, or be glad to inherit them, but their accumulation has been my most productive waste of time, a necessary distraction from so many other thoughts. If you look inside the stacks of archive boxes here, you’ll see they’re filled with videos—official series compilations of The Artifex from 1994–97, acquired in charity shops, garage sales, online, copy by copy. And somewhere in among them are the VHS originals I made when I was twelve, still in their shabby cardboard sleeves with my own childish writing on the labels. In this room are many duplicates of The Artifex Appears—I make spares to save the magnetism of the library tapes at my apartment—and I play them through cheap headphones from the dollar store, because the sound of Maxine Laidlaw’s voice through anything else is not the same. This used to be the place I came to listen when I needed consolation; now it is the place I come to talk. That’s a measure of improvement, I suppose.

  The diaries my mother kept between the ages of eleven and eighteen are not here—I have them in a safe at home, along with her jewellery and other personal effects. They were found in my grandparents’ attic during the clearance of their house in Bradenham: six fat volumes of her day-to-day thoughts, zipped into an old sports backpack with her school folders. What I’ve got here are the photocopied pages. On 7th January 1983, she wrote this: Francis doesn’t like how much time I spend with my diary & thinks it’s something only kids do ha ha ha! It’s like having an imaginary friend he says. He thinks I’m always whining that I don’t have time for other things but somehow I’ve got ages to be scribbling in a book. I told him it was stupid to be jealous of a diary & he said it was stupid to love talking to yourself as much as I do & it turned into a silly fight. We haven’t really made up yet. I said that I would write less just to shut him up but I don’t know. Her last entry was 11th February of that same year—a perfunctory account of her uneventful Friday at the office and her expectations for the weekend: another camping trip to Cornwall in the rain. There is no mention of late periods or pregnancy in these final pages—she just stops writing. But the arithmetic is simple to perform.

  It was reading back through all her diaries that made me think of you. In the week I spent away from work last June, recovering from what I told the partners was an accident on the squash court, I couldn’t rest—no matter what Alisha did to keep my mood from darkening, I didn’t have the regimen of going to the office and burying myself under the wing of VSK. By Wednesday, I felt directionless and agitated, distant from myself. When Alisha left to pick up groceries that afternoon, I went and took the diaries from the safe. I needed to be closer to the patterns of my mother’s voice again—the memories I hold of her are always shifting, but the person in those diaries is changeless.

  I had forgotten what her teenage mind was like—all the hypertensive rants about her parents, the rambling contemplations, how often she insists my father is a fling, a station on the path to somewhere better. She’s thorny in her diaries, full of attitude, a work in progress. But I never fail to recognise my mother in them. Her consciousness is always there for me. A small reality survives in what she writes. I cannot overstate how much it’s worth to have her thoughts preserved like this, available for reference when I need her. And it occurred to me, as I was going through them, that any child of mine could have the same.

  I’m doing this so you won’t ever have to speculate about the man I was before you met me. All the good and worthless things I know about myself have been laid out for you. I have spoken everything out loud so you can hear the way the truth sounds in my voice. Use these tapes to gauge the weather that might follow. Listen through your headphones in the dark. Understand where you have come from. Maybe there will come a day when I can lie to you as easily as I can pick my teeth—it’s likely in my nature, and I can’t promise you I’ll notice when it happens. These tapes are my insurance against that. Whoever I turn into, however I might disappoint you, whatever transpires from this point on, you’ll always have the person I am now. I hope there’ll never be another version.

  Before I met Alisha, you were not even a mote of possibility inside my head, and now you have become one of the first considerations of my day, my best distraction. When my inbox settles into silence every morning, and I’ve checked and organised my diary, and skimmed the Journal and the Times, I have half an hour to myself before I leave for work. This used to be the time I’d trawl the web, excavating any mention of The Artifex that I could find, hovering the cursor over video clips and stills, removing links from Wikipedia pages, buying unclaimed VHS originals, doing what I could to stop the show from circulating—anything to make Fran Hardesty extinct. Now I have a better occupation. I sit down in the quiet apartment and imagine you. The morning feels so different with you in it. I don’t know when you’ll be here. A year or two, or maybe more. But I’m certain what I want.

  I want to look at you some day and feel the great electric charge my father never felt for me, the immutable connection to your bones. I want that flush of astonishment my mother had when I spoke phrases she had taught me, all the ways of being that I learned from her. I want to teach you how to drive. I want to know your fascinations and watch you in pursuit. I want Alisha to explain this city to you. I want to show you England. I want to go with you to Audlem, press my heart against the ground and get back up. I want you to be raised outside disaster, without limits, beyond blood.

  Acknowledgements

  Everyone needs a friend like Adam Robinson, who drove me on the slowest roads to Wasdale Head one rainy weekend without asking for an e
xplanation—the existence of this book owes much to him and his knowledge of the Lakes.

  Ed Park’s insights on the first draft were profound and crucial. Rowan Cope lent my work the same pin-sharp editorial eye and helped me find solutions I hadn’t considered. Thanks to Maisie Lawrence, Jo Dickinson, and the whole team at Scribner. Thanks to my ever wise and thoughtful agent Judith Murray, and to Gráinne Fox and Kate Rizzo. Thanks to Caroline and Peter Hesz, Sharon Evans, David Lloyd; and to the much-missed Giles Waterfield for kind words I’ll never forget.

  My brother Nick inspires me daily, in ways he doesn’t even realise—this one’s for him—and Katy Haldenby was an enthusiastic early reader. My wife Steph was always there to help me navigate the darkness that descended in the writing of this story, and has supported me with her great heart and mind at every stage. Thank you, most of all, to Isaac—true happiness is the mere thought of you, my son.

  Benjamin Wood was born in 1981 and grew up in north-west England. A former Commonwealth Scholar, he is now a Lecturer in Creative Writing at King’s College London. His debut novel, The Bellwether Revivals, was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award 2012 and the Commonwealth Book Prize 2013, and won one of France’s foremost literary awards, Le Prix du Roman Fnac, in 2014. His second novel, The Ecliptic, was shortlisted for the Sunday Times/PFD Young Writer of the Year Award. He lives in Surrey with his wife and son.

  First published in Great Britain by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2018

  A CBS COMPANY

  Copyright © 2018 by Benjamin Wood

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  Hardback ISBN: 978-1-4711-2674-1

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