With a Zero at its Heart

by Charles Lambert

  10

  It is summer and he is sitting in the Circus Maximus watching Barry Lyndon on a screen the size of a Roman palace. The circus is bisected by the vast white wall, but it’s only white by day, when the sun plays on it and shows up the scuffs and grime. By night, it’s washed with colour. This evening, an Irish drizzle softens the outlines of trees and crofts, and then there is a battlefield and then a gaming house. How small the people are, he thinks, in Kubrick’s eyes. How wrong he was. The chariots must have swept past his ear. He’d like his aunt with him now, in this great arena, to tell her it’s only a film.

  1

  It’s his sister’s birthday. She’s in her bedroom, excited. When the doorbell rings – they’re here! – she runs across the landing and down the first flight of stairs, and then the second, past the piano and along the corridor towards the living room. The living room has a glass door and someone has decided it should be closed, but that’s no problem, she holds out her arms as she runs, maintaining a constant speed, she’s wearing a party dress, but that doesn’t slow her down, why should it? It’s her birthday dress, they’ll be waiting for her beyond the door, she thinks, her hands making contact with the glass, the glass bending slightly, imperceptibly, and then shattering. Blood everywhere. Glass. Tears.

  2

  It is his twentieth birthday and a friend he is secretly in love with arrives in his room and wakes him. He’s bearing a bunch of rust-coloured chrysanthemums so big his arms can barely hold them. They plunge the flowers into a bathtub and search the town’s charity shops until they find the vase they need, big-bellied, wide-necked. Back in his room, they thrust the chrysanthemums into it just as they come, a rustling mass of leaves and waxy petals, curling like fakir’s nails, above the sombre glaze, the same dull rust as the flowers themselves. Decades later, the flowers, which are flowers of death, are themselves long dead. But he still has the vase. He still has the friend.

  3

  The following year, in a room on the other side of the college, he comes of age. He doesn’t recall the day itself and most of the evening is lost to him as well, although he remembers dancing, and surely there must have been food of some sort, a quiche perhaps, provided by the girlfriend of the friend whose room they are in. They give him The Supremes’ Greatest Hits and he’s so delighted they appreciate his tastes he doesn’t see them laughing. He may have mimed to ‘Baby Love’ at some point during the evening. The next thing he knows he’s waking up naked in his own bed as a man and two whole days have passed him by.

  4

  He goes to visit a friend of his, a poet, who has no money. It’s his friend’s birthday. The normal gift would be a book, some music, but this year he decides the present might as well be useful as not, and suggests he buy his friend something to wear. They go shopping together in the new mall in Petty Cury, a place they officially despise. After trying on various items, a T-shirt, a pullover, his friend chooses some pale blue jeans he’d never choose himself. He wants to say No, not those, the power of money, but doesn’t. He pays, while his friend waits beside him, holding the bag. They stand in the street, embarrassed. Happy birthday, he says.

  5

  The phone call arrives when he’s deciding what to do to celebrate his birthday. It’s a young man he met in London that summer, the kind of blond boy you’d expect to carry a catapult in his shorts’ back pocket. Hello, he says, I’m your birthday present. I’m waiting for you at the station, and I can’t afford the bus. Half an hour later he’s in the flat and the celebrations have begun. There are gifts that last a moment, and gifts that keep on giving. And then there are boys who give and take, and think they have a right to everything, and sometimes – like all good things – they’re almost lovely, and bright, enough for this to be true.

  6

  The first of them to celebrate a birthday is the man he loves, and he has no idea what to buy. He wanders from shop to shop. He wants to buy books, and albums, but also something more intimate, a present that will show him how much, and how, he loves him. Another part of him despises presents, their empty gestures. He wants to say, I have given you all I can and have and am, if only that didn’t seem as cheap as nothing, if only it couldn’t so easily be misconstrued. He will cook for him, and make him happy, and he will know that whatever he does will not be enough, and that will be present enough.

  7

  His father’s ninetieth birthday they’re all in Rome. They have a flat near the English cemetery; they can see the wall from the windows. They’d planned a stroll around the part where Keats lies, but his father doesn’t want to visit the cemetery so they take a taxi into town and sit outside a bar by the Pantheon, and drink cappuccinos. They’re marking time until the evening, and dinner at home. It’s what his father loves, salad and ham and pizza bread and vine tomatoes, and wine. They’re laughing together, seated around a painted table, and everyone is wondering how many more times this will happen, and nobody says so. When they give him a wristwatch, he starts to cry.

  8

  He’s fifty and they have organised a party in their house. People are coming from all over Europe, new friends and old. The party will last the whole weekend so that nobody feels their journey has been wasted. Red and white wine arrive in fifty-litre demijohns, sliced meats on silver-plated salvers they carry across the town in giggling procession. He siphons the wine into jugs, and bottles. There are lasagnes and salads and drumsticks, but he barely eats. He talks to everyone and to no one. He has never received such presents. He’s moved to tears by the cake, and the laughter, and the love. It takes him a month to gather the final glasses up and wash them clean.

  9

  The two of them have been together for twenty-five years. They’d planned a civil partnership and a party, but the year has been given over to smaller celebrations at his mother’s house. He likes the word ricorrenza for these festivities, for birthdays and anniversaries, name days and public holidays, although all it means is return and the fact that so far none of them is dead. They drink to each other’s health and to those around them. They’ll have completed a year of celebrations before they leave, but they don’t know this yet. They have no idea how long they’ll be there, nor that the final celebration will be his mother’s death, from which there will be no more return.

  10

  They book a room in the local Travelodge, opposite the football ground, five minutes’ walk from the town hall and the statue of the Lady Wulfrun. The first evening they eat in the local Chinese buffet. The next two days they spend researching restaurants, Indian, Mediterranean, Thai, before deciding. They return to the hotel and find a bottle of champagne and are amazed that Travelodge has guessed their plans, until they find the card. The following morning, after the ceremony, they stand beside the statue in their suits and ties, with people they love, and they drink the champagne from plastic glasses as honest men, amused but not only amused, before eating Thai in a restaurant filled with exotic plants.

  1

  They are sitting together on a chair, and his head is resting against her cheek. She is holding a book in front of them, her arm is a little dead where the boy has been leaning on it, if anything can be a little dead, and she is reading aloud the words on the page. She turns the page with difficulty; he’s curled against her like a leaf against a stone in running water, utterly pliant and clinging. He is part of her as she reads the book, the words so close to his ear there is no interruption between their utterance and his reception, between her lips as they move and his ear as it presses against her skin.

  2

  The book is called The Land of Far-Beyond. He has been given it by his local Sunday school as a prize for attendance, his only merit. The book is a hardback. It has a dust wrapper, which is soon lost, and of which he will have no memory. He will remember the buttercup yellow cover beneath, which will soon fade to beige, and the lettering, which he can feel and almost read even now, with his eyes closed. It is his first prize. The book is a morality tale, an al
legory, but he doesn’t see it like that. He reads each chapter, over and over again, alone in his bedroom, learning the human faces of Dread and Deceit and Strength.

  3

  He can read anywhere, he discovers. While his father is watching television, or sitting in the back of the car or on a bus. You get lost in your books, his mother tells him, but that’s the opposite of what he gets. What he gets is a sense of where he is so exact he can tell you, or anyone else, each detail, the way people dress and speak, the nature of animals, and of their speech. In his most-loved books there is precisely what is lacking elsewhere. I am found in my books, is what he wants to say, as the fictional wind elides his hair and the word-made earth is hard and dry and unmoveable beneath his feet.

  4

  The boy is on the run, because that is what stories are for. When he comes to a mountain and finds a keyhole for his golden key, he slides the key in and a single leaf of mountain falls, to be followed by another, the stone leaves forming a staircase that leads into the heart of the coldness as surely as the leaves of the book, one page followed by another, lead him into the heart of himself. There is a well there, he can’t remember now if there’s water. He stands beside the boy as someone listens to their fear. What must I do? the boy wants to know. You must throw yourself in. There is no other way.

  5

  His childhood reading is guided by censors. He’s eight when Lady Chatterley’s Lover goes on sale. His best friend’s parents hide their copy behind a Harold Robbins novel in their bedroom, the first place the children look, the white-and-orange striped cover so familiar it only makes the transgression worse. They have buttercups but no pubic hair to thread them through. Casino Royale is next in their series of illicit pleasures. He imagines adult breasts as white hills, instinctively avoids a certain type of chair. Seven years later, he sees Last Exit to Brooklyn in a bookshop in Worcester and sneaks a copy into his bag to read in the car as his father drives, quietly wanking all the way home.

  6

  It is a large book and someone has spilt whisky on it, which gives some of the pages, when closed, a wrinkled look, like flaking leaves on a chest in fall. On the back of the jacket is a photograph of the author staring up towards the sky from which all seasons come, even in the city where he lives, so much a part of its fabric its name has become attached to his, a city in which mere nature has been subsumed by the words we use for it. It is a large book and he takes it everywhere he goes, from city to city, in search of his own fatal city, which will turn him into a poet.

  7

  His mother is almost blind by now. Beside her chair is a CD player and she listens to audiobooks each evening. He sits in the chair beside her, watching TV, or reading a newspaper. Sometimes she chuckles and lifts the headphones away from her ears to shake her head in disbelief. The language in some of these books is shocking, she says, it really is. I can’t believe people say such things, let alone do them. What are they saying? he asks her, amused. Here, she says, passing him the headphones. Listen to this. He unplugs the headphones and the living room is buffeted by an account of oral sex in a vicarage. They listen together, smiling, staring into space.

  8

  His love has been tempered by books. But that’s not right, if to temper is to shape what’s there. Without books, he might never have been there, or anywhere else, nor understood what love means. In his time he has been a gamekeeper and a lady, a young man with a teddy bear and champagne, a convict in a foreign port whose humiliation is what redeems him, a whore, a child. He has given love, often, and received it. He has learned the ropes of love by being beaten, reeling beneath the other’s blow, until his shoulders are burned bare on their roughness and he can only say yes, I will read on. I will learn what I am not.

  9

  He hasn’t read so much in years. He is sitting beside the window at first and then, when his mother’s bed is replaced by a hospital bed, in an armchair wedged between the pair of utility wardrobes his parents bought before he was born. He sits in the substance of her life as it ebbs and narrows, the channel finer each day, and he reads while she sleeps, and then tells her what he has read. She loves to hear his voice, and to know that he is reading. I taught you to read, she says. Do you remember? Yes, he says, although he doesn’t, his memory of being taught to read is a fiction. Yes, he says, I remember.

  10

  Because he is reading through his mother he has no guarantee that what was read yesterday and the day before that and the day before that is what will be read today, although the story is always the same. The act of reading is an unfolding and there’s no knowing what might be newly held within each fold. He listens to his mother’s words and his eye sees them and this is how the world is made, by the three of them together, the mother, the child and the book. A history that begins in an armchair in a room with sunlight coming through the window, and the scent of his mother’s powder in his nostrils, and his eyes half-closed.

  A month after his mother’s death he is home again. It is August and the sky is rowdy with migrating birds. Late morning he walks down the stairs into the hall and sees something move behind the leaning frame of a tapestry his mother made years before, of a garden; he’d forgotten he owned it. Reminded, shifting the frame, he finds a swift. He picks the bird up, quite still in his hand, and carries it to the street to place it on a wall. It pauses, then turns to regard him, grateful, head cocked. Goodbye, he says. Goodbye my darling, says the bird. With one bright brief beat of its wings, it lifts into the sky and is gone.

  I’d like to thank all those people – family and friends, too many to name – who appear in this book, for everything they have given me over the years. I’d like to thank Isobel Dixon, for her unswerving support and unbending faith in my work, and Sarah Salway, for her encouragement at a crucial stage. I’d like to thank Scott Pack, for taking an enormous risk, Rachel Faulkner, for her sensitive editing, and Vaughan Oliver, for making the book an object of beauty.

  And, of course, I’d like to thank Giuseppe.

  ALSO BY CHARLES LAMBERT

  Little Monsters

  Any Human Face

  The Scent of Cinnamon

  The View from the Tower

  The Slave House

  Copyright

  The Friday Project

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  This ebook first published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2014

  Copyright © Charles Lambert 2014

  Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2014

  Charles Lambert asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Source ISBN: 9780007545513

  Ebook Edition © May 2014 ISBN: 9780007545520

  Version: 2014-05-09

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