Invisible

by Jonathan Buckley

  The daydream lasts until she is passing the church in the High Street, when the thought of Francesc breaks it, and sends her rushing to find a telephone box and ring Mr Morton. A machine answers, with a voice she is not sure is Mr Morton’s voice, but she speaks to it anyway. She dictates a number. ‘Hello, Mr Morton, it is me. I am sorry to call but I want to know that it is OK, that you sent the letter for me. Please call this number,’ she says. ‘Tell them it is OK and they will tell me when I am there.’

  Edward closes the door, leaning his whole back against it, as if he has just escaped a pursuer. He breathes slowly, expunging the annoyances of the last hour: of being unable to find things that had been moved from their customary shelves for no apparent reason, of having to call ‘Excuse me? Excuse me?’ to people he knew were there but who would not respond, of being left to stand in a queue for five minutes before anyone told him the till was closing. He feels for the hands of his watch: it has taken more than two hours. The racket of the supermarket is still in his ears, and there is another sound, a barely audible sound that is happening now: the beep of the answering machine.

  He listens to the message. The caller gives no name, but he knows at once that it is the waitress from the Oak. Looking forward to an hour’s rest, he calls the number she’s given him.

  ‘Hello. Yes?’ a man responds, in an accent that’s perhaps Turkish.

  ‘Hello. I would like to leave a message for Eloni.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘For Eloni?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it possible to get a message to her?’

  ‘Who you?’

  ‘My name is Mr Morton. Edward Morton. I’m a friend of Eloni’s. She asked me to leave a message for her, at this number.’

  ‘She not here.’

  ‘Yes. But can I leave a message for her?’

  ‘Not here now.’

  ‘But she will be there, yes? Later, she will be there?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘So can I leave a message for her?’

  ‘You are Mr Modn?’

  ‘Morton, yes. Edward Morton. The message is very short.’

  ‘For sure.’

  ‘Right. The message is: “It’s OK.” That’s the message. “It’s OK. Everything is fine.” That’s all you need to tell her. “Mr Morton says it’s OK.” Is that all right? Can you tell her that.’

  ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘Yes, that’s the message.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Yes. You tell her, please: “It’s OK. The letter is posted.”’

  ‘What?’

  ‘“It’s OK. The letter is posted.”’

  ‘I tell her.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Yes. OK.’

  ‘Thank you very much.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Goodbye.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Wearied, he lies down for a while, and at six o’clock, his equilibrium regained, he resumes his work on Stadler. He is deep into chapter five, on the brink of a stag hunt, when music begins next door again. At an especially raucous chorus he abandons his desk to put a meal in the microwave. He eats in the kitchen, with the door closed. When he comes back to his desk the noise has not dwindled at all. There is no alternative now but to complain.

  He knocks with some force to make himself heard, and once more, and eventually someone comes down the hall. A belch erupts behind the door, then the door opens. ‘Hi, Ed,’ says Mike. A hand rubs hairy flesh at belly height. ‘What can I do for you?’ he asks, as though he has no idea. Emulsion vapour flows out from the house, with the smell of dog hair and marijuana smoke, and a trace of new carpet.

  ‘Would it be possible to have the music turned down a notch or two? It’s just that I’m trying to work, and it is rather loud.’ There is a pause, suggesting that Mike has been caught off-guard by this peculiar request.

  ‘Sure thing,’ he finally concedes.

  ‘Thank you. Sorry to be a nuisance again.’

  ‘No trouble.’

  For several minutes the music is indeed quieter. Then Dionne Warwick returns with a rapid crescendo and half a dozen voices are yelling ‘Walk on by’ like a football chant. Hoping that this is the finale of this evening’s singalong, he waits. ‘Hey Jude’ begins, and when it’s over it begins again.

  This time, Mike takes far longer to get to the door. His shoes slouch along the lino floor, making a statement.

  ‘Hi, Ed. What’s the prob?’ The whiff of beer is stronger now, and there’s a hint of whisky on his breath as well.

  ‘Mike, would you mind turning it down a little?’

  ‘We’ve turned it down once, Ed.’

  ‘But now it’s as loud as it was before.’

  ‘Wassup Mikey?’ one of Mike’s guests yells from a room at the rear of the house.

  ‘It’s cool,’ Mike calls over his shoulder. ‘We turned it down,’ he explains, as if this compromise might have been forgotten.

  ‘I know, but –’

  ‘It’s not loud, Ed.’

  ‘But I can hear every word.’

  Mike gives some consideration to this point, or perhaps is studying the face of his visitor. ‘Sorry, Ed,’ he says, ‘but I’ve turned it down for you once.’ He seems to think the conversation might end here.

  ‘Yes, I know. Thank you. But –’

  ‘And nobody else has complained. Nobody has said a thing. Nada. What does that tell you?’

  ‘That our neighbours are stone deaf,’ he almost responds, then says: ‘Perhaps I just got here first.’

  ‘It’s not loud,’ Mike repeats. ‘It’s your hearing’s too good, that’s what it is. Obvious, isn’t it?’

  ‘No. I don’t think that’s it.’

  ‘Oh come on, Ed,’ Mike coaxes. ‘Of course you can hear better than us. Well-known fact. Compensating, isn’t it? You know what I mean.’ There is a pause; his shoes scrape as he shifts his weight from foot to foot. ‘It’s a fact, isn’t it? You know?’ he goes on, now with a suggestion of embarrassment.

  ‘Mike, it’s late and you’re keeping me awake.’

  ‘Look, Ed,’ Mike begins, with a beery sigh. The fingers of his left hand are picking at the wall or the frame of the doorway. ‘This is how it is. You say it’s loud and I say it’s not loud. We’re not going to agree on this one. But I’ve got friends staying, right? Just for a day or two. They’ve come all the way from Australia. From the other side of the world. Just to see me, OK?’

  ‘I understand, but –’

  ‘Got a right to have a bit of fun with my friends, haven’t I? They’re only here for a week or two and then they’re off. Who knows when I’ll see them again? Might be years. See what I’m saying? We’re entitled to a bit of slack, yes? Fair’s fair.’

  ‘I’m not –’

  ‘Live and let live, Ed. Have a bit of respect for each other, eh? You might have a bit of a party one day, all right? And when you do, you won’t find me complaining.’

  ‘C’mon in, mate,’ yells the one who had yelled before. ‘Come and have a brew.’

  Footsteps advance halfway down the hall, stop, retreat. ‘Want to come in?’ Mike asks.

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘I didn’t think so.’ Mike sighs again, but this sigh has a more accommodating tone than the one before. ‘Look,’ he says, ‘we’ll be packing it in soon. Ten minutes, say. Twenty, tops, I promise. We’ll turn it down a bit for you. But lighten up, eh? Just a little bit,’ and a hand lands softly on Edward’s shoulder to send him on his way.

  The bawling continues, beyond ten minutes, beyond twenty, beyond forty. ‘My Way’ is succeeded by ‘I Will Survive’, which leads into ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, followed by another reprise of ‘Hey Jude’, at which point, defeated, he goes to bed, taking the tape with him. Through headphones he listens to Jochen Stadler. The voice in his ears, hushed, the voice of a hunter within range of his prey, describes the sighting of a mighty stag, amid ancient trees that rise as high as the vaul
ts of Köln cathedral. Like a magnificent monument, the stag stands proudly between buttresses of green-dyed sunlight. Lightly, slowly, as though tiptoeing between mantraps, Stadler’s father and his companions close in, their conversation a flurry of finger signals. The stag’s head comes up; its muzzle makes small drinking motions in the air. The wide-spreading antlers, turning into an intense beam of sunlight, blaze like branches of gold. But the stag does not run. Regally, with something like contempt, it walks into the shadows, onto the ancient forest path – and here Stadler uses a word, Holzweg, that awakens a resonance, a resonance that has joy in it, and also solemnity.

  He stops the tape and attends to the echo of the word in his memory, and from the echo emerges a specific place and time, a room, a small room at his school, in the basement. The corridor was always dark, even on summer afternoons, and he found it pleasant for that reason, because its light was attuned to his meagre sight. And a perpetual dusk was in the room itself, because there was only one window, facing the blank wall of the boilerhouse in a small cul-de-sac that was always in shadow. Here he was taught by Mr Elkin, on his own, while his classmates were at woodwork or art lessons, in rooms that had a spacious and bracing fragrance he sometimes found unbearable, like the fragrance of the sea blowing into a monk’s cell. In the room with the broken desks and chairs he was taught by Mr Elkin, who came from another school once or twice a week, to teach him alone. Mr Elkin’s head was large and almost circular, and he was completely bald, so his mouth and nose and bulging eyes seemed to be set on a plate of skin. Sitting beside him, Mr Elkin whispered urgently, as if sharing a secret he had been waiting for years to tell someone: ‘We are embarking on a great journey, Edward, you and I. A marvellous journey.’ In his enthusiasm he seemed to forget the age of the child he was talking to, but his difficult talk of clarity and complex ideas, of abstractions that had weight and texture and colour, engendered an excitement at the idea of something that was precise and palpable and mysterious all at the same time, something that had the aura of a science and a religion. Mr Elkin talked of the alchemy of the German language, the process by which words were combined to make new words, words that were like a chemical reaction of their elements. ‘Waldeinsamkeit,’ he pronounced. ‘What a word! What can it mean?’ he questioned, astonished on his pupil’s behalf. ‘Part one: Wald . That is, wood or forest. To this we add einsam – that means lonely or secluded. And keit, that is state or condition, like“-ness” at the end of an English word. So what do we have? Forest solitude. The loneliness one feels in a forest. A definite kind of loneliness, which one feels in the midst of a multitude of trees and only there, nowhere else.’ A deep and nourishing loneliness; an exhilarating and humbling loneliness; a condition quite distinct from Verlassenheit, which is the loneliness of the abandoned and the forlorn, an everyday loneliness. ‘Waldeinsamkeit,’ repeated Mr Elkin. ‘Do you see?’ High above Mr Elkin’s head, a lightbulb shone like a full moon in fog. ‘Yes, sir. It’s a nice word,’ he said. ‘It is a wonderful word, Edward,’ said Mr Elkin, rubbing his hands together, as if he were about to commence some physical exertion. ‘This book is filled with hundreds and hundreds of wonderful words. Thousands and thousands of them. As many wonderful words as there are leaves on a tree. We are setting out on a journey into a forest, Edward. Our lessons will be our Holzweg – from Holz, meaning wood, and Weg, meaning way or path. Thus Holzweg, a logging path. But,’ he warned, smiling, ‘it may also be a special kind of path, a path that might be perilous or enchanting, a fairy tale path that might lead you to the magical lake or to the ogre’s den.’ And they set off along their path into the German forest, their Holzweg, starting from A for apple and also for Apfel. ‘Der Apfel. The apple. Masculine singular der Apfel. Plural die Äpfel.’ Mr Elkin wrote a sentence on a piece of paper; he made the letters large, but not large enough. He recited what he had written: ‘Der Apfel fällt nicht weit vom Stamm .’ Again he read it out loud, savouring the wisdom of it. ‘Meaning: the apple falls not far from the trunk. Meaning: like father like son.’

  ‘Der Apfel fällt nicht weit vom Stamm,’ he silently repeats, as sleep encroaches with the sensation of a boat lifting from a sandbank on an incoming tide. ‘Der Apfel fällt nicht weit vom Stamm.’ He thinks of his father, of their stillborn talk in his father’s workroom, and he restarts the tape, for the conclusion of the stag hunt. In the heart of the primeval forest, Jochen Stadler is kneeling with his father beside the dead stag. It is late in the day and the light in the forest has darkened. Its green has become the green of the sea, and Stadler is overwhelmed by the feeling that the forest is as large as the ocean, as old as the ocean. The stag’s eye, becoming silver in death, stares at him. And in the trees, staring at his father through the sight of a rifle, there was a man whose mother was dead, and his brothers as well, killed on the orders of the Reichsjägermeister, the master of Jochen’s father, the man who dreamed of making this forest a German forest.

  thirteen

  Eloni sits on a stool against the kitchen wall, peeling potatoes, waiting to hear the sound of a car. Mr Laidlaw will be back today and might be arriving for lunch, Mr Caldecott told her as he was leaving for London, but it is almost twelve o’clock and still Mr Laidlaw has not arrived. Facing her, sitting on a stool that belongs in the bar, Ian slices vegetables at the steel table, complaining about his work by making an effort of it. The blade of his knife clacks on the chopping board with every cut, as though he were cutting through thick cables, then the noise stops. She looks up, as perhaps he intended, and sees him inspecting a floppy piece of toast, dangling it between his fingers as if it were something dead that he’d found. Disgusted, he lobs the slice towards the bin, but it hits the side and slides to the floor. ‘Want some?’ he asks, holding up his empty cup.

  ‘No. Thank you,’ she says.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ he replies, and on his way to the sink he scrapes up the toast and lobs it into the bin, trying to make the action look graceful and casual, like bowling a ball. He puts water in the kettle and spreads the newspaper on the draining board. One by one he turns the pages, his face suggesting that he can’t imagine who would be interested in such things, though he was the one who bought it, as he does every Sunday. He shakes his head, while his thumb traces over and over again the angles of his beard, a silly thin line of soft bristle that runs along his jawline and over his lip. He leafs backwards and forwards through the newspaper, looking for something worth looking at. ‘Ever read the stars, El?’ he says, pouring his second cup. ‘Your horoscope. What the future’s got in store. Ever give it a look?’ He holds up a page to show her a woman with very long fingernails and hair as black as a cat’s, above a chart of telephone numbers in thick black type.

  ‘Sometimes. Not all days.’

  ‘A giggle, ain’t they? Give this a go: “You will be tempted by an offer that looks too good to refuse. Think carefully before you act. Listen to what a good friend has to say. Remember – only fools rush in.”’ A hard little laugh makes his mouth fly open. ‘Bit wide of the mark with that one. Chopping fucking carrots for another year, if I’m lucky.’ Taking the newspaper and the mug, he saunters back to the stool, shaking his head as he goes.

  ‘Yes. It is stupid,’ she replies.

  Smoothing the pages on the table, he gives her a smirking smile that is perhaps meant to be attractive, but is like a boy copying the smile of a film star he likes. ‘What’s your sign then, El?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Your star sign? When’s your birthday?’

  ‘June. The five of June.’

  ‘Gemini. Here we go: “There may be trouble ahead, but good times are just around the corner. There could be a windfall before too long and romance might come from an unexpected quarter. But now’s the time to cast away some baggage you’ve been carrying for too long. Clear the decks. Don’t leave till tomorrow the things you can do today.” Wise words, I’m sure.’

  ‘A windfall. What’s a windfall?’

  ‘Pennies f
rom heaven,’ he explains. ‘Like an apple falling off a tree. That’ll be the twenty quid,’ he snorts, arching an eyebrow.

  Her first thought is that he means the tip that Mr Laidlaw left for her last time he was here, but then she is sure that he could not have known about it. Seeing that she doesn’t understand, Ian repeats, ‘The twenty quid from our caring employers. The voucher?’

  ‘A voucher?’

  ‘Yes. The voucher,’ he says, taking a wallet from the back pocket of his jeans. ‘A letter from HQ. “I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your valuable contribution.” You didn’t get one of them?’ he asks, removing from the wallet a folded piece of paper. ‘With this in it?’ he flicks the piece of paper to her, as if tossing away a piece of rubbish.

  She opens it up, and discovers a golden bell inside a garland of leaves, and the figure £20 above the name of the Beltram Leisure Group. ‘No,’ she replies, puzzling over the sentence that must explain the £20. The word ‘redeemable’ raises associations with Jesus Christ. ‘I don’t have one. What is it?’

  ‘What I said, El. A voucher. You take that along to any hotel run by the mighty Beltram outfit, apart from this one, obviously, and you get twenty quid off the price of your room, subject to restrictions. Like it can’t be a weekend and it has to be between November and February, but not Christmas, or any other fucking time anybody might actually want to go anywhere. So you spend thirty quid getting to Gloucester on a pissy Thursday in the middle of January to save twenty quid on an overpriced room you wouldn’t want to stay in if it cost nothing. And you don’t even fucking get a letter. Never seen it before in your life, right?’ he asks, furious for her.