Contact

by Jonathan Buckley

  ‘What’s that?’ I said.

  ‘You know what,’ he said, with a chastising finger-wag. ‘If you don’t, I’ll have to.’

  I was so annoyed by the gesture that I didn’t give him an answer.

  He smiled to himself and put a cigarette in his mouth. ‘Sorry, but I have to go,’ he said, as if I’d been asking him to stay. He slid off the truck, then asked me to wait a moment. He went into the caravan, and emerged after a minute with a pair of photographs. ‘I had copies made for you,’ he said, placing them onto the roof of my car, one at a time, like a gambler playing a winning hand. Without another word he climbed into the Toyota and drove away.

  Sitting in the car, I looked at an image of myself, as I had been more than a quarter of a century earlier. On a footpath that crossed a field of grass stood a young man who looked as if he’d last had a haircut three months previously, and had done the job himself, with knives; he wore a black zip-up jacket and jeans. I had no idea as to where the picture had been taken, and neither could I recall the jacket. Across the grass in the foreground lay a shadow that must have been Sarah’s, and in the photograph of Sarah – standing atop a tree stump, with perhaps the same field stretching out behind her – most of her body was overlapped by a shadow that must have been mine. She wore a cerise T-shirt; I recognised that. The clouds, the crispness of the shadows, the tones of the colours – every clue suggested that the two pictures had been taken at the same time, but I couldn’t locate them.

  Two days later I received a letter at home – or rather, a note. The note was wrapped around another pair of photographs. The first showed an expanse of sandy ground in front of a wall that was the same colour; in the foreground there was a large puddle of brown and oily water; in the middle of the puddle stood a boot, with a rod of bone sticking out of it. The second photo showed four soldiers looking askance at a figure that was sitting against a wall, a figure charred so badly the head looked like a huge block of coal, except that there were ice-white teeth in it, parted in a howl; the soldiers were looking at the corpse as if it were just a man begging for the price of a cup of coffee, and one of the soldiers was Sam. On the note, five words were written in dark pencil – I AM NOT A LIER.

  9

  I ran the war pictures through the shredder and put the shreds into an envelope, which I dropped into a rubbish bin in London the next morning. Had it been simply a case of myself against Sam, I might have gone to the police at this point, but this wasn’t a feasible course of action, the circumstances being as they were. Throughout the day I had visions of returning home to find Aileen waiting for me, with another letter, opened, in her hand. I imagined him phoning the house and Aileen answering. By lunchtime I had become so uneasy that I rang her on a pretext, just to make sure that nothing had happened; at three o’clock I called again, and then I rang Sam, to stall him while I tried to think what I might do. I went out into the street to speak to him, so I could use the traffic noise as an excuse for keeping the conversation short. Immediately, before I could say anything more than his name, he apologised for the photographs. ‘A bit strong,’ he said, wryly dismissive, as if he thought I might follow his lead and make light of it. I told him, with the greatest possible coldness, that I was acknowledging receipt and would call him again in a couple of days to discuss the situation. The tone might be taken, I hoped, to imply that a strong response, perhaps involving legal sanctions, was imminent. He was talking when I hung up on him. For a few seconds this felt like a victory.

  Once the first shock of Sam’s photographs had been absorbed, I had simply wanted to be rid of him. If someone had said to me that in return for a hefty payment they could remove him from my life, that they wouldn’t harm him but could guarantee that he’d never trouble me again, I would have written a cheque on the spot. But perhaps, in that very terse conversation on the phone, there was something in the last words I heard him speak, a momentary suggestion of desperation, that elicited a spark of sympathy; or perhaps, after cutting him off in mid-sentence, I became conscious of having handled the exchange with less than perfect dignity, and a tinge of sympathy proceeded from that self-rebuke. Whatever the explanation may have been, by the time I returned to my office I was in a slightly less unforgiving frame of mind. I told myself that his photographs, and the way he’d forced them onto my attention, confirmed that I was dealing with a young man who was deeply disturbed, and that the only way of resolving this crisis was to find a way of persuading him to submit to some sort of counselling. Inevitably, as the dialogue with his counsellor brought him closer to a more stable condition, he would abandon the fantasy of being my son, and all would be well, or well enough. On my journey back home that evening, I was rehearsing the words with which I would persuade him to talk to a professional; I would undertake to make enquiries on his behalf; if it turned out that private consultations were the best course, I would offer to help with the payment. Even if he refused, I reasoned, he would see that I was trying to help him, and accordingly would give me more time, at least.

  In the morning I phoned him again, but had to leave a message on his voicemail: I said I’d call him that night. Aileen was away for a couple of days, visiting her father to get him settled into new accommodation. This in itself was some relief – for forty-eight hours there would be no risk that Sam might put me into an inescapable corner. Relatively unworried, fairly confident that I would be able to persuade him to accept my proposal, I worked in the London office until lunchtime. In the afternoon I had a meeting in Greenwich, which finished a little sooner than anticipated, so I went for a walk in Greenwich Park.

  It was a glorious day, with a shimmer of heat on the grass, and the towers over at Canary Wharf gleaming, and the walls of the Queen’s House as bright as new paper. People were picnicking under the trees; every slope had a dozen sunbathers – there was an air of ease and wellbeing about the place, and I caught something of that air. Everything would soon be resolved, it seemed to me, as I strolled around the park, and when I was in the car, moving swiftly through light traffic towards the motorway, I had a sense that my life was being restored to the right path, that I was making progress back to clarity. This being the case, I don’t understand why I did what I then did.

  Approaching the slip-road for the motorway, I saw the sign pointing straight ahead for Canterbury; I had driven past this sign many times, and the name usually had no greater impact on me than any other I passed. So it seemed on this occasion: speeding by, I registered the word ‘Canterbury’ as I registered the words ‘Dartford Crossing’. I stopped at the lights, where the various slip-roads merged. The lights changed; I drove to the next set of lights, where again I had to stop. Here I saw another sign for Canterbury, of which I took note, along with various other items of equivalent information. The lights turned green, and I switched lanes – not, I think, from any sudden desire to revisit the city in which I had been born and had lived for more than thirty years, but rather as if I’d merely decided to call heads instead of tails. I re-joined the road that I had left two minutes earlier, and drove forty-five miles to Canterbury. I had been back three or four times in the year after my mother died, and only once since then, more than five years ago.

  I pulled up outside the house that had been my family’s. Nothing in particular came back to me as I looked at the building, nothing in any detail. What I experienced was instead a vague, fond, warm regretfulness, a banal and generic kind of feeling, a run-of-the-mill happy-sadness such as one might be expected to have in such a situation. More than any memory, what engaged my attention was a plastic cat that peered skyward in the centre of the front garden; after a minute or two I realised that it was staring at another plastic cat, which had been placed in the lower boughs of the apple tree. Having observed the second animal, I drove on to Chatham Road, to the house in which Aileen and I had lived. Here too I failed to muster a response of any intensity. The place had been smartened up, I noted, and was no longer divided into flats; the whole street was smarter
now, with some high-quality exterior paintwork on show and a number of expensive cars parked along its length. I gazed at the window of what had been our kitchen. This was a significant location, I had to tell myself. We had lived here, happily for the most part, and I owed it to Aileen that I should now feel something stronger than a sense of deep familiarity. So I stayed in Chatham Road for a while longer, honouring the time we had spent here, recalling things that had happened here and managing to experience something – an almost expired echo – of the contentment of those years. From Chatham Road I went to where my workshop had been, and found the premises occupied by a shoe-repairer who, it appeared, had recently gone out of business: a few pairs of shoes were heaped on the counter, beside a stitching machine, but the windows were grimy inside and out, and letters were spread over the floor. A voice in my head murmured: you once worked here. This place was yours. It might as well have been telling me that the shop was associated with someone of whom I’d never heard.

  But a gorgeous evening was beginning: warm, with a few thickening strokes of cloud and just enough of a breeze to put some movement into the trees. I left the car in a backstreet and walked to the cathedral. Approaching it, I was conscious that I had walked along this street with Aileen dozens of times, but the scene through which I was moving gave rise to no specific memory: the buildings seemed, instead, to confirm simply that we had been among them, together, many times. The days of our past in this city were like the swirl of a great flock of birds, in which no single bird could be seen clearly amid the thousands.

  And yet, an hour or so later, when I was gazing at the river in Westgate Gardens, the memory of a single day in Canterbury did detach itself from the mass, and I could picture Sarah as she appeared, unexpectedly, on the path to my right, by the flowerbeds. I was pleased to see her, but uneasy too: however hard I tried to act as though we were only acquaintances, I would certainly betray myself in ways of which I would be unaware, and we might be seen by someone who knew me as Aileen’s partner. Sensing my discomfort, Sarah hooked my arm and made me walk with her for a minute. ‘Would lovers make such a show of it? Of course not. Double-bluff. Relax,’ she said, laughing. It was a windy day, and when she released my arm she walked on with her eyes closed, guiding herself by sound. Hearing, she said, was the truer sense, being passive: sight makes you think you own the world. ‘Try it,’ she said, but I wouldn’t. She turned to walk away backwards and called out, when she was almost at the bridge, ten yards in front of me: ‘Come on. Try it.’

  I stayed in the park for a while longer, chiefly, I think, to try to hold this image of Sarah in my mind. And as I strolled around the park it became clear to me, as though it were an errand that could no longer be postponed, that I would be leaving the park to go to the one site that remained to be visited: where Sarah had lived.

  It was on the opposite side of the city, so I decided to get there by car. The drive took longer than anticipated: the traffic was heavy by now, so heavy that once or twice I was on the brink of turning back. Then I lost my bearings at a road junction that I didn’t recognise, and having found the right street, I drove past Sarah’s flat without realising what I’d done – she had lived nearer the end of the road than I remembered. Eventually I was standing at the foot of the steps that rose to her door, up the side of the building. I looked at the door, and within a few seconds it became the door on a different day: I was standing, in the past, where I was standing now, looking up the steps. The day was cold and the stamps were black with moisture, and slippery. The door had been closed on me. I looked at the closed door, and experienced a glimpse of Sarah. For a moment I could see her, standing in her flat, arms crossed, chin tilted up, telling me to leave. I could hear the contempt in her voice, see the contempt in her eyes. She’d spent the night with someone – Thomas, I think his name was. On the table stood a cigarette lighter that was his. No sooner had I arrived than she’d told me. I was less surprised than I made out to be. I was affronted more than surprised. ‘And what, exactly, are your grounds for complaint?’ she had said. She was right, of course. And although wounded, I was grateful that she’d done it, that the ending which I’d been too ineffectual to bring about had now been delivered. Yet her admission – it wasn’t so much an admission as a statement of fact – had also caused a convulsion of jealousy that made me furious: the angriest, perhaps, that I had ever been. But barely a trace of those emotions could now be revived. I could recall that she’d closed the door as soon as I had stepped out, and had shut it with such force that the flap of the letterbox had clattered. Now I felt a small wince at the thought of that instant, and an insipid pang at the recollection of that cigarette lighter on the table. Otherwise, the recollection of this final confrontation had no effect on me, almost as if the scene had happened in a film I’d seen many years ago.

  I returned to the car but found that I couldn’t drive off: a mood of deflation had overwhelmed me. The idiocy of what I’d done with Sarah was incomprehensible, and neither could I understand what I’d just been doing. Years ago I had been a fool, and now I was almost old, and there was my non-son to deal with too. But the light in the street was beautiful and a ring-necked dove was springing about in a tree on the opposite side of the road. The evening was delicious. I got out of the car and walked back into the centre of the city, where I found a café that seemed pleasant. I ordered a coffee, then decided to eat there. At one point an intriguing-looking character took a seat at a nearby table. He was wearing a paisley waistcoat over a shirt that had once been white but was now the colour of week-old lilies, plus a bow-tie patterned with lime-green flowers on a brown background. The trousers were capacious brown corduroys, which rode up to reveal lime-green socks. A fastidiously trimmed little moustache and tiny goatee, and a thick topping of dark and slicked-back hair, completed a look that had something of the music-hall entertainer about it. He was in his late thirties, I’d have said, but his skin had an exhausted pallor and dryness, especially around the eyes, and his hands were deeply wrinkled, as if overwashed. Two pots of tea had been set on his table, and against them he’d propped a book that had a picture of Pope Benedict on the cover. With an expression of earnest bafflement he scanned the pages, moving his lips as he read, and before turning each page he would make notes on a piece of card, scribbling aggressively, as if putting together an argument. This is a very strange person, I thought. It was only some minutes later that it occurred to me that he would have had the same thought, if he’d seen me an hour earlier, standing at the bottom of the steps, and someone had told him the facts of the situation.

  As I was walking back to where I’d parked, I rang Sam. It was my intention to be as sympathetic as I could, to gently bring him round to the idea that he should seek help, but this strategy was defunct within a matter of seconds. His immediate response, on hearing my voice: ‘So, have you told her?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I haven’t told her. Not yet.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, and the way he said it was peculiar – it was as if he’d expected a different answer and was now nonplussed. There was a silence, then – as I was about to make my proposal, in words that I’d rehearsed a dozen times in the café – he went on: ‘I thought you might have had a bit of a tiff.’ Missing his meaning, I asked him why he would have thought that. ‘Gone back to her mum and all that,’ he said. He waited for me to understand.

  ‘How do you know?’ I demanded.

  ‘Know what?’ he replied, insultingly disingenuous.

  ‘That she’s not here.’

  ‘Lucky guess,’ he said. Again he paused; he started to chuckle. ‘Oh come on, come on, come on,’ he coaxed, like a teacher running out of patience with his slowest pupil. ‘Get a grip. The pictures.’

  ‘What about the pictures?’

  ‘No stamp on the envelope, was there? Therefore …?’

  He wanted me to lose my temper, and I might have done, had a woman not been walking a dog ten yards behind me. ‘I know there was no stamp on the envelope
,’ I hissed, clamping the phone to my jaw. ‘I know the postman didn’t bring the bloody thing.’

  ‘Nice choice of words—’

  ‘But it doesn’t follow that you’re spying on me. It doesn’t—’

  ‘I was in the neighbourhood. I passed by a couple times. No sign of her car. So I thought—’

  ‘Harassment. That’s what this is.’

  ‘No,’ he said, calmly, as if I’d misidentified a species of tree. ‘That’s not what it is.’

  ‘Harassment is exactly what it is. And harassment is an offence. It’s a criminal offence. If you—’

  ‘No, no, no, no,’ he murmured. ‘It’s not harassment. It’s a cry for help. That’s the phrase you want. That’s what I’m doing. I’m making a cry for help,’ he said, with a parodic tenderness for himself. It was all I could do to stop myself hurling the phone across the road; I held it away from my face, as his voice chirped: ‘Hello? Hello? Hello?’