Damascus

by Richard Beard

  Yesterday, Hazel would have been too old for this. Today, her age and her expectations seem irrelevant. All that matters now is now, and she moves with her mother, side to side, forwards and backwards. Her mother’s cheek turns and presses against the top of her head.

  ‘It’s alright,’ Mum says. ‘Everything’s going to be just fine.’

  Hazel remembers this morning, waking up excited: Monday, swimming after school. She pinches and punches Olive for the first day of the month, not as hard as she could have, but still pretty hard, meaning Olive you are as embarrassing as ever with your non-swimmer’s glasses and your books and being only eleven all the time. Probably it’s all Hazel’s fault for pinching and punching harder than allowed because it’s only supposed to be a game. And now Olive may be dying while everything else is alive and carries on, her mother’s hand on her hair, her own hair against her skin, her skin her skull her bones.

  ‘You have beautiful hair,’ Mum says. ‘You both have beautiful hair.’

  She slowly pulls herself away and says she has to go now, back to the hospital, and Hazel finds she’s old enough to understand that her mother is being brilliant. She has made herself useful at the hospital, contacted her husband, garaged the smashed car, made Hazel feel involved. At last, something terrible has happened and Mrs Burns can cope with life like this because knowing she has always been right makes her strong. Her fears have been realised, so she is no longer frightened, and she acts without panic because a child in the hospital comes as no surprise to her.

  She carries the nearly empty carrier-bag along the corridor and opens the front door. She shivers as if it’s cold, looks back at Hazel and smiles, says ‘at least it’s not raining,’ and then closes the door behind her.

  Almost immediately the phone rings and it’s Dad sounding far away, saying everything twice via the echo of the satellite. He is checking all the airlines trying to get a flight, but when Hazel tells him that Olive is still unconscious (in her most controlled voice, imitating her mother) he runs out of things to say. Hazel suddenly knows why, without knowing how she knows: it’s because he can’t find a positive angle which applies to this, he doesn’t know how to sell it to her. Instead he starts calling Olive Olivia.

  ‘Mum’s car’s a write-off,’ Hazel tells him, and her Dad gives up, gives her a number to call if there’s any news, says he’ll ring later when he gets a flight, says he’s thinking of her all the time, of her and her mother, and of course thinking of Olivia, Hazel’s new and unknown sister.

  Hazel stares at the telephone, back in its cradle. It is green and plastic and so clean it shines. It has been made by somebody and transported by somebody and stocked and sold by somebody, all so that it can be used by her. She has never really noticed the telephone before, and its history of living people, and she suddenly wishes the room were full of all the people she’s ever known and all the people she’s ever going to know. She wants to memorise each and every one of them, feeling for the life inside them.

  One morning on a day like any other she wakes up. She pinches her sister too hard and punches her on the way to the bathroom and now her sister is in hospital. She is dead already, perhaps. And if this can be true, then she wants a family of thousands around her, and her Mum and Dad and sister, and all the friends she’s ever had, and all the boys she’s ever met on holiday, and the feeling she remembers from several seasides that there are other human beings as well as herself who are truly alive, and the instinct she has that knowing this is love.

  11/1/93 MONDAY 08:48

  Spencer stepped back against the closed door to make room for a woman carrying a young child. Then he looked up at the overcast sky hoping for a solitary ray of sunlight or perhaps its opposite, an oncoming storm, some easy evidence of the gods. The sky, however, remained neutral, clouded like the outside of a light-bulb.

  Nothing in the street looked obviously different, and William would have been disappointed by his first European day. Jepson’s the music shop opposite was about to open, like any other Monday, as was the bank and the travel agent and the charity shop and DJM Games. Cars were jammed in the road, either waiting to park or waiting to pass the cars waiting to park. Several pedestrians bustled past and an impatient motorist sounded his hom.

  Spencer turned up the collar of his raincoat, and with his books under one arm he dodged between the cars and across the road to the games shop. The window display had been all chess ever since Short started losing to Kasparov, which he seemed to have been doing for ages, and the various chess-boards in the window were hard on the eye like grids for an impossible crossword. A present for Grace, Spencer thought, and decided to look inside on his way back.

  He passed the Rising Sun pub, which was still advertising its Hallowe’en fancy dress party, then had to side-step its open cellar-shaft which was surely a hazard to children. A woman with a pram overtook him and he followed her until she stopped to look in at the butcher’s, after which the shops thinned out and Spencer was left with an uninterrupted walk, past the registry office and the fire station, all the way to the library.

  Hazel had been so unexpectedly gorgeous that he’d completely forgotten about Jessica. In fact, Hazel was so very much there and in the flesh that he could hardly think coherently at all. He wondered if she’d noticed. Did she mind? And why had he babbled on about the house when all he really wanted to know was are you my Damascus? He wanted a sign, any sign, telling him that he and Hazel were right for each other and that therefore his life had changed direction overnight. He looked closely at faces in the street or in the traffic-jammed cars, as if in any one of these faces he might find the sign telling him what to do next. If only he knew what to look for, or if it was likely that all these people, including himself and Hazel, were moving around each other day after day and meeting or not meeting in accordance with a readable pattern. If only he knew how to read it.

  Either that or there was no grand scheme. Then life would be like a newspaper, disconnected and arbitrary from beginning to end. Nothing could be known for certain in advance. You had to wait for accidents and events to take place, and then make the most of them. You had to take life as you found it.

  A bus stop had been marked out between a pair of lime trees in front of the broad flight of steps leading up to the library, an impressive Victorian brick building with a sharp roof and a spire-clock permanently stopped at half-past four. On top of the spire there was a flagpole, and the breeze slapped at a blue flag with black writing which announced NLW - Libraries are Magic. Spencer hesitated. It wasn’t impossible that Jessica was inside the library, so he double-checked the arrival time of Grace’s bus. He noticed that on either side of him the lime trees were bleeding a black tar-like substance onto the pavement. Before he could even consider accepting this as the omen he was looking for (with black traditionally meaning bad in the otherwise incomprehensible scheme of things) he jumped up the steps and pushed open the swing-door to the library, only to be faced, opposite the CD and Video section, by a choir of middle-aged people all reading from different books as loudly as they possibly could. They stopped as soon as they saw him.

  Spencer coughed and walked self-consciously to Issues and Returns where Miss Irene Haliday (breast-badge), a spinster who lived with her parents (spontaneous value-judgement) was waiting for him, tapping a pencil against her teeth. She smiled brightly and told Spencer that the library was closed.

  ‘I wanted to return these books,’ Spencer said, keeping his back turned to the book-readers just in case Jessica was among them. It was the first time he’d ever done that.

  ‘We don’t open until ten today,’ Miss Haliday said. ‘We’re rehearsing for our Most-Noise-Ever-Heard-In-A-Library event.’

  'The books are due back today.’

  'For National Library Week,’ Miss Haliday went on, ‘which started this morning. We have a series of events, starting with the Most-Noise-Ever-Heard-In-A-Library, as I think I’ve already said. At lunchtime we have Miss Havisham i
n a wedding dress abseiling from the clock-tower down the front of the building.’

  “The Miss Havisham?’

  ‘Someone dressed up in a wedding dress to look like Miss Havisham. There are leaflets which explain everything.’

  ‘I just wanted to bring my books back.’

  ‘After ten. Everyone’s welcome.’

  Spencer glanced over his shoulder and saw that the choir of readers had now dispersed into separate little groups. ‘Actually there’s something else,’ he said, lowering his voice. ‘I was hoping to have a look at the reference section.’

  ‘Ten o’clock, like everyone else.’

  ‘It’s quite urgent,’ Spencer said.

  Miss Haliday frowned at him over her glasses, becoming less bright and helpful by the second. He leaned forward over the counter and spoke so softly she had to turn her head to hear him properly.

  'I need to find out about a contraceptive pill,’ he whispered. 'I mean it has to be today, by definition.’

  Miss Haliday looked at him with a new and unmistakable coldness. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘the library is closed until ten. As I think I’ve already said.’

  Spencer didn’t linger. Keeping his head down and his collar up, and still in possession of his library books, he left the building and jumped down the steps outside. The lime trees were still spewing their ominously black and unpleasant muck. The council shouldn’t allow it. They should chop them down and replace them with nice straight tall green leafy trees for the children. Names came into Spencer’s head: Joshua Lucas Georgina Rose Sophie Jane Edward Jonathon Sholto Thomas Ellison Adam Peter Richard, all the names he and Hazel could give to their very recently conceived baby.

  Because in the absence left by meaningful signs there remained the bald fact that earlier today he’d had unprotected sex with a virtual stranger. He wondered what to do next, and where to turn, but on the way home he encountered no sudden or eloquent sign which immediately made everything clear to him.

  It is the first of November 1993 and somewhere in Britain, in Doncaster or Ruislip or Pontypool or Lame, in East Grinstead or Dundee or Exeter or Redbridge, the television is on in the Kellys’ lounge, sound up loud, blaring out every crash and bang of Henry’s Cat or Cat and Mousse or The Greedysaurus Gang. Mr Kelly yells at Philip (17) to turn it off, right now. Then there is only silence, and the uncomfortable Kellys gathered vaguely about the room, vaguely uncomfortably aware that this is the kind of time when families should gather together. This is what families are for.

  Spencer is hiding behind the television, his knees pulled up to his chin. He is thirteen years old and he’s not going to cry. His mother is crying. Spencer concentrates on the dark ventilation cuts and the bright screws behind the television as his mother tells him don’t be sad. As his mother, crying, tells him don’t cry.

  'Think of a happy memory,’ she says, meaning any happy memory with his sister Rachel in it. ‘Think it all the way through, from the beginning to the end.’

  She says if Spencer can remember it now he’ll always be able to remember it. He should keep it handy and bring it out whenever he needs it. If he does this then Rachel will always be with us, one of life’s little miracles, is what his Mum says.

  Spencer isn’t coming out from behind the television set, not in a million years, and his mother gives up. She goes over to the leather sofa and sits down, forgetting to take off her scarf. Nobody has a clue what to do except Mr Kelly, who is kneeling in front of a low table covered by a white lace cloth, pouring stiff measures of Macallan or E & J or Knockando into a coffee cup. He sips. He swallows, his jaw working minutely backwards and forwards. He narrows his eyes. He has a pencil in his hand and there is an Oxford pad, lined, open on the table. He writes: UNFAIR.

  ‘We can do this tomorrow,’ Mrs Kelly suggests, attempting a smile.

  ‘We’ll do it now,’ Mr Kelly says. ‘Before we forget.’ He sips and swallows and Spencer makes himself watch. His neck hurts and so does his knee, but somehow he knows this without actually feeling any pain.

  ‘Tell me how you remember her,’ Mr Kelly says, pencil poised above the paper. Tell me the best thing about her. Anything about her.’

  Mr Kelly wants to write down everything they remember about Rachel before it’s too late, but nobody says anything because treating her as if she’s dead is as bad as actually killing her. Spencer wonders how his father can fail to understand this.

  Philip is sitting on the front of the desk where he keeps his computer, a Sun SPARCstation or an IBM or an Acom. He rocks backwards and forwards, arms crossed. He is thin, very pale.

  ‘When the car slides like that,’ he says, ‘it’s called a fish-tail.’

  Mr Kelly starts to write this down, and then stops.

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  ‘I can’t deal with this,’ Philip says, and he turns to play a game of chess already set up on the screen behind him. He mutes the sound and chooses black. He defends.

  ‘Rachel wanted her ashes scattered at Wembley,’ Spencer says.

  His father, pencil at the ready, looks hopefully at his second son.

  ‘After she lived to be a hundred and one. No flowers.’

  The car, the swerve, Spencer remembers, what Philip calls a fish-tail, the crash and the bang. The rest of them came home in a police car. On the inside it was very clean, as if it wasn’t used enough.

  ‘Philip started the argument in the car,’ Spencer says, pointing at his brother’s back. This seems relevant, and important.

  ‘Not now,’ Mum says, but it was Philip who complained that three in the back seat was too dangerous, even though there was no other way they could all go swimming and take Philip into town at the same time, was there?

  Dad refuses to write this down. He sips and swallows from his mug, looks at what he’s written: UNFAIR.

  Spencer wants to retreat: behind the television, upstairs to his room, under his bed with the bats and the balls and the disassembled snooker table. Rachel would have hated him for thinking of giving up like this. He therefore makes a determined effort to concentrate on the stiff white lace of the tablecloth, or Philip’s shimmering computer screen, or the author names on the books next to the special shelf reserved for quality videos. Harold Robbins and John Le Carré and July Cooper and George Orwell. It helps him not to cry. Stand By Me and The Light That Failed and Ginger and Fred and The Lavender Hill Mob. He knows it won’t work for ever: there simply aren’t enough things to read, nor enough random words to hold back his tears.

  Nothing will ever be the same again. Up until now Spencer has always been the same person with the same idea of how life should be, but now he suddenly isn’t any more. He doesn’t feel old enough for this. He hasn’t had enough experience to prepare him for it, and no experience from before now can possibly be strong enough to survive it. He wants it to teach him something, but what? People die and disasters happen bam, suddenly and without warning, just like that. Does it mean, if he knows this, that he is now grown up? Is it an essential grown-up truth that suddenness only works one way, and that anything which happens this suddenly can only be bad? And what if his mother is wrong, and it’s not any memory of Rachel which stays available to him, but only the memory of losing her? In which case he’ll always be able to trace the day he grew up to this single moment and its particular books and videos, to the way Philip rocks on his chair, playing black, refusing to move his queen.

  Time can stop now, if that’s alright.

  If it moves on from here then that isn’t fair to Rachel.

  But no matter how hard Spencer tries to freeze the moment (he fixes the names of the writers, the titles of the films, his mother’s scarf, his father’s word, Philip’s French defence and his isolated queen), time insists, eventually, on moving.

  ‘Tell me how you remember her,’ Mr Kelly says.

  Rachel pinches him, punches him, and beats him to the bathroom. At breakfast she wins the competition to get the most Bourbon biscu
its in her mouth. She is the first into the car, wearing her tracksuit covered in badges meaning one day she’ll be International European Champion of the World, and in the paper every other day. She’ll be in the paper tomorrow anyway, and Spencer has to work his jaw like his Dad so as not to cry like his Mum. He hides his face in his hands and tries ever so hard to remember how Rachel used to catch her breath, her hands on her knees, knees bent inwards slightly, looking up and smiling brightly. Everything turns out just fine.

  11/1/93 MONDAY 09:12

  Henry Mitsui had eaten late breakfasts all over the country in a hundred hotels no better or worse than this one. The tables in the dining room were round and the choice of pictures discreet and uneventful, like the engraving of a frozen Battersea Park on the wall behind his father. The rest of the dining room was occupied by the breakfast silence of single managers looking forward to the morning session of the Institute of Sales and Marketing Management Successful Selling ‘93 Awards. They wore badges to say so, along with their names.

  From the buffet, Henry’s father had served himself a bowl of prunes and a glass of milk. Henry had a pot of tea and The Times, which he’d folded in half over his empty plate.

  'I was hoping we could talk,’ his father said.

  'I always read The Times at breakfast.’

  His father pursed his lips and chased a prune round his bowl as Henry searched for a particularly British idiom, of the type he’d been collecting, to emphasise the distance between them.

  'It allows me to fire on all cylinders,’ he said.

  He turned his attention back to the paper and the intricate problem of turning a page, flattening the creases and refolding it in half. Not much news today. More people had been killed in Northern Ireland. The Maastricht Treaty came into effect. Nigel Mansell had crashed a sports car and a rare bird had been spotted in a field somewhere. It was a good bad day for celebrity deaths: River Phoenix and Federico Fellini. Otherwise The Times was packed with its usual measure of life, with people changing jobs, winning and losing at games, reading and liking and disliking books, hoping for something good on at the cinema, confident that the theatre wasn’t what it used to be or maybe it was, and just as curious now as always to learn of the births, marriages and deaths of strangers. Henry had grown to like this part of the morning, but today he was finding it difficult to concentrate, even on the headlines. He felt that no matter what had gone wrong elsewhere in the world his own problems were more pressing, excluding perhaps those of Fellini and River Phoenix.