Damascus

by Richard Beard

‘A music shop,’ William whispered. He breathed out and in again. 'I can see a music shop.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘A Japanese man.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘What about the bus going by?’

  ‘No. Nothing else.’

  ‘There’s a bus. It’s going by us now.’

  ‘I see no bus.’

  ‘People? You see the people on the other side of the street, looking into the shop windows? Some of them are looking over here.’

  ‘I see a Japanese man. I see a music shop.’

  He took a step backwards into the house, and Spencer quickly closed the door behind him. He started breathing raggedly as if he’d just stopped running. He grinned broadly as he caught his breath, bent over to hold his knees as he coughed a couple of times.

  ‘There,’ he said. ‘Easy. Hazel taught me that.’

  ‘What about the bus? And the other people? What about the travel agents and all that?’

  ‘She said I had to block some things out. You have to stop thinking that everything might be important, even though it probably always is to somebody, somewhere. You can’t try to see it all. You can’t check everybody out, one by one. You just can’t.’

  Isn’t that a bit sad?’

  ‘Otherwise you’d never move on from one day to the next. You have to believe it’s going to be OK. That’s what Hazel said, and she’s right.’

  ‘Well she’s been to College, hasn’t she?’

  Hazel was brilliant, William said, and he wouldn’t hear a word said against her. He was a total convert.

  ‘Allah be praised,’ Spencer said. ‘But a pity she’s gone home, then.’

  ‘Maybe she hasn’t.’

  ‘She should make up her mind.’

  At last William managed to straighten up without coughing. He spluttered a bit and clapped Spencer on the back.

  ‘You two are made for each other,’ he said.

  ‘How do you know? How does anyone ever know?’

  ‘Don’t fuck it up, Spencer.’

  It wasn’t the kind of language Spencer expected from William. He thought he probably resented it. He had the same right to make a bad decision as anyone else.

  ‘Something similar happened to me at your age,’ William said. ‘I talked myself out of it and look what happened to me.‘

  ‘It’s not as if I have to decide today, is it? I can decide tomorrow, or the day after that, or next week. There’s no need to rush into it, is there?’

  ‘She might already have left. You’ll only get her back if you decide today.’

  ‘Tomorrow. I’ll decide tomorrow.’

  Tomorrow never comes, Spencer. Everyone knows that.’

  It is the first of November 1993 and somewhere in Britain, in Staines or Swindon or Narberth or Horsham, in Melksham or Melrose or Erewash or Huddersfield, everything is stylishly patterned in Paisley. Sprightly white-haired old ladies sit and drink tea and knit one or pearl one or drop one, spooling out cardigans in angora or chenille or alpaca for their children or grandchildren or victims of natural disaster. The poor eat cake and shortbread biscuits. The blind have The Archers or Book at Bedtime. The mad and the bad and the jealous angry have successfully learnt, in the patient manner of the British, to suppress their emotions. Gruesome murders are no more than amusements, exquisitely investigated in grand houses like Heveningham Hall or Herstmon-ceux Castle by H. R. F. Keating or Philip Dickson Carr or Dame Ngaio Marsh. Children discover first love beneath blue skies on sand dunes. The schools instil a profound respect for Shakespeare and everyone has their own house (their own house their castle) and limitless offers of employment.

  Mrs Mitsui, Henry’s mother, keeps track of paradise by ordering The Times once a week, on Mondays. Any news not to her taste she attributes to the famously dark British sense of humour, which she’d have learnt to appreciate more thoroughly if only she’d been allowed more time.

  ‘I should have killed myself there and then,’ she says.

  Henry Mitsui is eighteen years old and it’s not the first time he’s heard his mother say this. Britain is perfect and once upon a time, a long long time ago, she was engaged to be married to a perfect Briton, to the Duke of Wellington or William Rathbone or Lord George Gordon.

  'It was definitely going to happen,’ she says defensively. ‘It was published in Forthcoming Marriages.’

  ‘But it didn’t happen, did it?’ Henry says. ‘So why keep on about it?’

  A date had been set and it was all arranged. Then, without any warning at all, her perfect Briton was suddenly taken by a dreadful and unlikely disease, by pneumonia or sclerosis or smallpox. And after that everything had been different. Nothing was ever quite the same again.

  ‘But you never actually saw him dead, did you?’ Henry says meanly. ‘You never saw a body or went to a funeral.’

  ‘It would have been too much for me to bear. Besides, there were visa complications.’

  Henry would like to confide in his mother that he’s just broken up from his latest girlfriend, who wants to spend more time in Asaka with the self-defence force. His mother, however, has already moved on to the part where if only she’d stayed in Britain, she’d have been sure to live happily ever after. Her lost life is a busy one, involving daily lunches at Royal Ascot or livery dinners at the Saddlers’ Hall or gala concerts at the Equinox, Leicester Square.

  ‘I won’t be seeing her again,’ Henry says, breaking the rules. He’s supposed to keep quiet and sympathise in silence. His mother shoots him an angry look until he concedes, as so often before, that her single definitive regret should be allowed to back up vastly against the smallness of now. It overshadows everything: Henry’s break-up from his girlfriend, the dryness of the roses in a vase on the table, the violence of the headlines from today’s precious Times: Massacre and Hatreds and Killing. Local Education authorities should be axed, says report. Henry would say he loves his mother, but he doesn’t want to end up like this. He doesn’t want to live a life stifled by the strength of a single remembered event. He instinctively knows that people should have more than one memory which travels with them, defining who they are. It has to be more healthy to share the influence out over many. That’s what being balanced means.

  ‘I didn’t know how to keep her,’ Henry says, again defying the silence. From his mother, he wants the reassurance of a mother’s unconditional love, and then he wants her pity. He’s asking for proof that his life touches her life, and that there are other people as well as himself who are truly alive. Otherwise other people have a tendency to fade. It becomes difficult to place them, which can make him wonder why they matter.

  ‘Did you love her?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘This girl of yours. The one who’s gone back to Asaka.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘I wish I cared more for her.’

  ‘Do you feel like killing yourself?’

  ‘Mum.’

  If you don’t, then it can’t be love.’

  ‘How can you say that? How does anyone ever know?’

  ‘You just know. I knew. And when the time comes you’ll know too. It’s destiny. It’s not something you can avoid.’

  ‘You did.’

  ‘I was cruelly handled by fate.’

  ‘You married Dad.’

  ‘His was the best offer, after I felt sane again.’

  ‘But it wasn’t love, was it?’

  ‘No-one can mope about forever.’

  ‘You could have gone back to Britain,’ Henry says. ‘You could still go back, instead of idealising what might have been.’

  ‘I don’t idealise. And anyway it’s not the same now.’

  ‘Of course it is.’

  ‘It all disappears. It’s just another part of Europe now. That’s what it says in the paper. And anyway, who said I didn’t love your father?’

  ‘You did, you say it all the tim
e. You say you’d rather have died.’

  ‘Oh, Henry. Put a smile on your face. You don’t want to believe everything I say.’

  ‘So what should I believe then?’

  ‘Believe what you want to be true. That way everybody’s happy.’

  11/1/93 MONDAY 13:12

  ‘Go home, Hazel, I would.’

  Talking to yourself was the first sign of madness, or maybe the second. Not knowing which sign it was was the next sign and then you were mad.

  After the quiet of the garden, Hazel had been surprised by the busyness of the street, and how close the daily lives of other people came to Spencer’s front door. The contrast, and a meaningless gust of wind which blew straight through her, made her feel suddenly displaced and vulnerable, with no idea of what she was made for or how she fitted in. She saw a workman leant on a spade reading a newspaper, but the newspaper was no way to find out what was going on. It couldn’t even begin to tell you, for example, why a nice girl like Hazel was all dressed up for a big night out at half-past-one on a dull Monday afternoon. She felt watched, and blamed the dress. She should go home, forget about Spencer who’d never make up his mind, forget about Henry Mitsui who’d soon be gone.

  Carrying only her purse and wearing no coat, she’d crossed her arms and stepped into the road. There were plenty of people around, but strangely no cars, so nothing to stop a quick escape. As soon as she got home, she was going to change out of her dress. Then she was going to search for her old brochures about medical training and bar school, because if it wasn’t to be Spencer then a change of profession could be just the turnaround she was looking for.

  ‘Go home, Hazel, there’s a good girl. There’s no reason you have to decide everything today.’

  Was that her mother’s voice?

  Playing with her car keys, delaying her return to the car, Hazel hoped that what she was doing was the right thing to do. Teaching at a distance had taught her the names of the plants in William’s garden and the correct order of all the Kings and Queens, but not whether she should go home and give up on Spencer. She looked in at the window of the charity shop with its arbitrary display. A brown cloak had been donated, and a long cardigan, and an ashtray made from half a coconut. There was an ornamental duck, a paisley shawl, an embroidered cushion, a Sharp radio, and a six-piece set of period cutlery with a matching initialled napkin ring. Hazel stared at all these things, hoping any one of them might mean something. She wanted a sign telling her to stay, and it could come from the objects in the window, from the workman and his newspaper, from any passer-by. She didn’t really care. She just wanted a sign.

  The workman whistled, and Hazel walked quickly to her car. She locked the door behind her and then checked the passenger door. There was always this same problem with the present moment. It was never laid out as placidly as the past, with its neat consecutive events, and you never knew quite as clearly where you stood. She started the engine and pulled out into the still deserted road.

  She and Spencer were failing to make it through the day. He obviously wasn’t ready to move on, and Hazel was nothing more than an awkward intrusion. She found it difficult now to remember her earlier optimism, and could only smile unhappily at whatever sudden enthusiasm had made her give Spencer’s address to the school secretary. It wasn’t that she’d been expecting him to invite her to stay, but she knew it was always a possibility. Making it public, even in a small way, had been like making a bet on it and trying to make it happen. It hadn’t worked, but it was his loss, and he’d always remember this as the day he avoided his one significant opportunity to change things for the better.

  And anyway, he still had the perfect Jessica to console him. She wondered if all men did this, and then tried to piece together a perfect man. What would he be good for? Everything, she supposed, which would leave her redundant, and still imperfect. She couldn’t change the person she was, and neither could Spencer. Basically, he was never going to make up his mind, and just because he never decided anything he thought that everything was still possible. He was wrong. The two of them, like everybody else, had a dozen or so important events in the past which anchored them to who they were. It was too late to change that now, even if Spencer treasured the vain dream of some kind of redirection sponsored by the gods. He’d just have to accept that their incompatibility was more permanent than that. It wasn’t like a temporary case of memory loss, easy to cure with a sudden shock.

  At the top of the street, where Hazel should have filtered out into tomorrow and the rest of the world, she found her way blocked by a ribbon of plastic police-barrier, flipping in the breeze. She pulled in at the bus stop, between two lime trees. A crowd had gathered, but she decided to wait it out. There would be no sign now, and nothing encouraged Hazel to turn back. Briefly, it did occur to her that Henry Mitsui might be bluffing. He knew where she lived. He therefore wasn’t on his way to Spencer’s to miss her for lunch, because in fact he was waiting for her at home, a blister on his thumb from ringing her bell. Nobody would take much notice, not until next month sometime when they read in the paper that children had stumbled across a woman’s body abandoned near playing fields.

  That was definitely her mother’s voice.

  The crowd on the library steps began to cheer. Hazel leant forward over the steering wheel for a better view, and saw a flurry of white wedding dress make a hesitant start to an abseil down the front of the library. It made her smile. The woman in the wedding dress descended more vigorously, and this, surely, had to be a sign. The road was closed for Miss Havisham, who’d broken her solitary vigil to abseil in a wedding dress down the face of a library.

  Before she could change her mind Hazel turned the car round, reversing close to the lime trees and the black muck made by bacteria on the greenfly waste. Life was everywhere, she thought, and this too could be taken as an omen, and a good one. As she drove back towards the house, she reassured herself that everything she could see was only real life, and there was no reason to be frightened. Whatever she might imagine there was only this, there was what she could see, and she wouldn’t see anything else because only a certain number of things turn out to be true. She remembered the flying skirts of Miss Havisham and laughed. This was what there was, every day until she died, and it would have to be enough.

  Hazel backed her car into the same space she’d just left. She wanted to believe that coincidence was fate and that luck had meaning, and therefore she wasn’t all alone. She wanted there to be a right and a wrong way to proceed. Otherwise there could never be a Damascus but only closed roads (for security reasons), and an insignificant Miss Havisham, and nothing but random events like these to determine what happened for the rest of the day. Or any day for that matter, when day after day became, eventually, a life.

  She climbed out of the car, and was thoughtfully locking the door when a long-fingered hand reached for her elbow, begging her attention.

  9

  No-one wears patterned sweaters in 1993.

  THE TIMES 11/1/93

  11/1/93 MONDAY 13:24

  ‘I’m so glad you came back,’ Spencer said. ‘You wouldn’t believe how happy it makes me.’

  He wrapped his arms round her waist as she reached up into the top cupboard for teabags, the high-heels of her shoes lifting off the kitchen floor. With his nose, he nudged her hair to one side and kissed her several times behind the ear, which was much more fun than what he’d just been doing at the table, pushing birthday cake candles into Jaffa cakes.

  ‘Not now, Spencer.’

  ‘I thought now was always as good a time as any?’

  ‘It was. But it isn’t any more.’

  ‘You frightened me,’ Spencer said, holding her more tightly and closing his eyes. ‘I thought you weren’t coming back.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Spencer,’ Hazel said, shrugging him off. ‘He’s in the hall!’

  Spencer took a step back. He pierced a seventh Jaffa cake with a slim candle while Hazel noisily prepare
d a pot of tea and two mugs. Celtic Football Club Forever, and Cromer, My Kind of Town. Spencer tried again, stepping up behind her and splaying his hands across her lower back.

  ‘Your timing’s terrible,’ she said.

  'It’s not timing. It’s desire.’

  ‘I’m surprised you recognise it.’

  She didn’t once turn towards him, or move her body back into his hands.

  ‘I looked out of the window for a sign,’ Spencer said, his lips moving across her neck. ‘I thought I saw a ray of sunshine.’

  ‘Rubbish. Leave me alone.’

  ‘Is he a boyfriend?’

  ‘He has a funny tooth. He looks at me all the time.’

  ‘Well it was you who invited him in.’

  ‘He still has the labels attached to his sweater.’

  Spencer let her go. He considered disappearing to the office for a computer-assisted sulk, but instead he pointedly speared the last of the ten Jaffa cakes.

  ‘Marks and Spencer labels.’

  ‘So why invite him into the house? And why have you left him in the hall?’

  Because he might be a mad killer nutcase, why else? He was a foreigner with a funny tooth and a relentless stare and labels hanging off a brand new horribly-patterned jumper. He was a stranger come to murder them all, which was almost certainly untrue. Hazel knew that not everyone unknown was a murderer. To think like that was the beginning of a kind of madness, her mother’s kind.

  ‘He’s a student of mine who’s about to leave the country,’ Hazel said. 'I’ve never met him before and probably never will again.’

  ‘So what are you going to do with him?’

  ‘I’m making him some tea.’

  ‘I can see that. He could be a madman, anything.’

  ‘But probably he isn’t. Most people aren’t.’

  And tea was always useful because it had a beginning and an end, and when it came to an end she could ask him to leave.

  Falling in love with Miss Burns was easy. Even finding her in London now seemed straightforward enough, a mixture of patience and destiny. Henry was therefore surprised to discover, now that he was actually here, that he had no idea of what to say to her. She was so young, and so blonde, and there was no sign at all of a friendly black cat. He’d expected her to be older and more like a teacher, but she still had the same unflappable voice and he couldn’t say he was disappointed. His love, transcending purely physical considerations, remained intact. It was a pleasure to watch her closely, re-learning her from life. At last this was the real Miss Burns, for two years his distanced teacher at the Central London Institute of Learning, his one true love.