‘Thou?’
‘Mill. And that’s just the digital side of the business.’ He has a beard so black and thin and feeble that even up close it gives the effect it’s drawn on with an eye pencil.
‘That’s branding for you,’ his colleague says, hair gelled violently to the left in a way Dove thinks must remind everyone but him of Hitler. He is swiping through his mobile phone to show his friend a photograph of a young woman. Blonde, the pear-drop fullness of her lips pushed coquettishly towards the camera. ‘This is the one I told you about. Meeting her again tonight.’
‘Where are you going to take her?’
‘Spent a hundred and fifty quid at that restaurant so I’m hoping this time just a few drinks will be enough for a repeat performance.’ He winks, his left eye closed a second too long, and they laugh. The one with the cigarette papers takes his handful of change without once looking at the old man giving it to him, as casually as he might pump a dollop of soap into his palm. He and his colleague are still chuckling as they exit the store. Dove buys the tablets and a bottle of water, head dipped by way of apology for anyone in the vicinity of his age group. The old man doesn’t seem to notice.
Next door is a tall drab building, unremarkable yet malignant, for this is where Dove works, and where, on a bad night, his dreams take place to taunt him. They call it the Pit, which makes it sound as crowded and ferocious as the trading floor in a Wall Street bank, but the call centre for ambulance dispatch is remarkably muted, given the urgency of its business. An expanse of grey space is divided into booths by screens up to chest height, offering staff an illusory privacy. Dove’s booth is at the rear, close to a vending machine that throws an unchanging season of light across the desks; an eternal, neon midwinter. There are no windows on this side of the building; a television is mounted in the far corner, set to a news channel with the sound off. Dove squints to half read the subtitles streaking across the bottom of the screen. Black box flight recorder. Missing plane. Whale. Professor.
There have been occasions in the past: the riots, disasters, bombings, terrorist attacks, when the pictures shared an eerie correspondence with the calls coming through, and he’s imagined himself stationed at a listening post, far above an unravelling city.
‘What time do you call this?’
Cliff is the office manager. His baldness bends reflections of the strip lights into haloes as he checks an imaginary pocket watch. Cliff smiles and sticks out his tongue – a friendly gesture that leaves Dove unmoved. The joke is always the same.
‘Won’t happen again,’ Dove says, taking his seat and logging into the system, the screen immediately illuminated by a grid of pulsing lights. Each of these lights is a different call with a different emergency, and he answers whichever is next.
‘London ambulance.’
‘Hello?’ a man says. His voice is hurried and reedy. ‘I need help.’ Dove takes the man’s address. There are few scenarios he’s yet to encounter. The most common calls regard choking, strokes, road traffic accidents or heart attacks, though almost every medical situation can be handled satisfactorily until the paramedic team arrives by referring to the corresponding diagnostic checklist that appears on screen at the click of a mouse. In that sense the role is automated, and the call is a series of cues for the next instruction. But the job cannot be done by a robot, for it also demands an essence of humanity. To maintain a tone both reassuring and authoritative, as on the other end of the line life’s unnavigable map unfurls for some other poor soul to find themselves lost.
‘My son,’ the man says, ‘his hand is stuck.’
‘Where is it stuck?’
‘Behind a radiator. I told him to get his sock from behind it and . . .’ The man’s breathing speeds.
‘Try to stay calm,’ Dove says. ‘Now tell me. Is he in any pain?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Not yet?’
‘The heating has only just switched on.’
‘Can you switch it back off?’
‘That’s the thing. I can’t. It’s broken.’
Dove knows within seconds if a call will find foothold in his consciousness. He once spoke to a fifteen-year-old girl who’d abandoned her newborn daughter in a storm drain, for fear of her father finding out she’d had sex with a classmate then secretly carried his child to term. She begged Dove to save the infant’s life. When he asked her to tell him exactly where the storm drain was, she couldn’t give him an accurate answer, only that it was somewhere on Wanstead Flats. And so he had to piece together the fragments of her memory. She could see an electricity pylon. Behind that the silhouette of the Olympic Stadium to, she guessed, the south-west, because it was similar in angle to the view she always saw from the school bus. Directly to what must have been the east, street lights and traffic, which Dove figured could only have been Lake House Road, as it passed what she described as a circular muddy hollow a hundred or so metres away that he recognized from his walks there as Cat and Dog Pond (so named because it only exists when it’s been ‘raining cats and dogs’). An ambulance was dispatched, the baby found safe and well, but Dove stayed restless for weeks afterwards, his appetites for sleep and food frayed. This call, the hand behind the radiator, may linger for a shorter time, but remains for now a new and unwelcome guest in the hotel of his psyche.
Dove can hear the caller frantically pacing the room.
‘It won’t switch off!’ the man says. ‘Do you hear me? It won’t switch off!’ A pulsing orange blob moves across the grid on Dove’s monitor – an ambulance passing slowly through rush-hour traffic. In the background, a boy sobbing, high-pitched and fearful. Perhaps eight, nine years old at most.
‘What should I do?’ the man asks. Dove scrolls through the checklist.
‘It’s important to remain calm for your son’s sake as much as your own.’ The boy shrieks again.
‘He says it’s burning!’ The man shouts so loudly Dove’s headphones vibrate. ‘I can’t get it out! What can I do!?’
Dove can’t help but think of his own father, a man he has never met. Closing his eyes he sees a blank human shape, on which he superimposes his own gait and features. If they passed in the street would he recognize his own face, twisted by the years? Would there be magnets in the blood to pull them together? Are they the same man, timed to the same internal rhythm, written in the same infernal code?
‘Daddy.’ The boy’s voice is both quiet and loud, fear pitching it at a frequency Dove can barely hear.
‘They’re coming,’ the man says, and then again into the telephone, ‘They are coming, aren’t they?’
‘They’re almost there.’ The orange blob moves a couple of millimetres – in real terms, the length of a bus, maybe two.
The walls of the Pit are lined with pictures of lakes, flowers and seascapes, and beneath them small signs read words like ‘peace’ and ‘serenity’. Dove hasn’t noticed before, but he sees now they’ve been scribbled out and replaced by words like ‘anguish’ and ‘despair’. Gallows humour is a valuable currency when you’ve tried and failed to talk someone through a cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
On the telephone comes the sudden mechanical caterwaul of sirens. A door opening. Paramedics’ boots beating on a stripped wooden floor.
‘They’re here,’ the man says, and hangs up. Dove will never speak to him again, never know if the boy’s hand is saved. And yet, despite the lack of resolution, the work proves cathartic. He imagines every call as a tiny hole in a wall, bleeding light into a dark room. When he puts his eye to the hole he can see outside. He can see life. He is illuminated.
Without warning, the headache reveals itself. What pain went before was a warning shot fired across the bows, but this is something tough, something solid. Dove squeezes the throbbing pupae of his temples just as Cliff passes, licking his thumbs to wet down his eyebrows, which he only does when he’s thought of something funny to say.
‘Dove, are you OK?’ He scans the other booths, ensures his colleagues are
listening. They dip their heads from his eyeline. ‘Should I call an ambulance?’ His joke told to little reaction, Cliff walks briskly back to his office, leaving Dove at his desk, rubbing his skull with both hands like a clairvoyant searching a crystal ball for visions of the future. He is almost never sick. Whoever his parents were, they apparently had strong immune systems; a thought that, on nights when he’s particularly lonely, gives Dove hope they’re alive, as though he wants to find them, as though they deserve to be found.
It happens so rarely that it’s easy for him to imagine the headache as the baby steps of death. But this isn’t how he imagined dying would feel. He imagined dying would be a draining. A move towards emptiness. But this is more as though he’s being filled, packed with something new.
And then he remembers the bog violet again. But there is more. He remembers the bog violet and the hand that once picked it. He remembers it all and it hurts and is glorious. With searing clarity: a memory that isn’t and has never been his.
THREE
Peter Manyweathers looked out of his third-storey window at the Brooklyn street below and the sweat dripping from the faces of the people passing by. He imagined the odours of their armpits and it made him doubly grateful for the zing of the lemon-fresh disinfectant he’d already cleaned the kitchen with once that morning.
He tossed the small book of instructions for the use of hazardous chemicals into his work bag and opened the fridge to the gleaming white teeth of near-empty shelves. An almost finished carton of orange juice, half a bottle of ketchup and two eggs a week past their use-by date – 8 June 1983. It was a balanced diet of sorts, he supposed. Clinging to that notion, he ate a bowl of dry cornflakes one by one, tossed the eggs in the garbage, leafed through his diary and considered the day ahead. Like most days, it was chiefly comprised of dirt.
He tried moulding his mousy-brown hair into presentable form, but it had grown disobedient, so he scooped it beneath a Yankees cap worn at a tilt unbecoming to his age. Raking the growth on his chin with his fingers, he twisted to glance at his profile in the mirror and knew there were middle-aged men looked far worse. Wobbling paunches. Thinning tops. False teeth. At least he had everything he was born with, and in roughly the shape it was at the start.
The kitchen was compact, no more than five steps between the oven on one wall and the door on the other; a collation of soft furnishings; sparse, dotted afterthoughts. There were fifteen minutes before he needed to leave for work. Loath to waste them, he buffed the metal sink, wiped down the countertops and mopped the floor until his reflection shone.
He left his apartment repeating the words ‘buy some milk on the way home’ and enjoyed the short walk to his lockup. The heat hadn’t yet reached the point where it became unmanageable, but was certainly on its way there. Slipping keys from his pocket, Peter unlocked the huge door of a space far too big for his one-man band, but on which he’d landed an excellent rate some years before. The sign he’d had erected above the doorway – Kingfisher Cleaning (a cute painting of a kingfisher with a feather duster poised in its beak) – still pleased him every time he saw it. Smiling, he turned on the lights, the switches shifting with a gratifying clunk, and found the place satisfactorily immaculate. Changing into his blue overalls, he readied himself as best he could for another day of unsanitary extremes.
It was never an easy job, but especially not that summer. Iowa, Missouri, Illinois and a handful of other states were posting their hottest on record. New York was boiling over. Manhattan’s mirrored walls trapped the heat inside the city: a giant greenhouse, its air shimmering with the funk of damp bodies. Tropical birds were reported nesting in Central Park. Even the kids that hung on the corner of his street were too hot to hassle anybody – not that they ever really hassled Peter, if they noticed him at all. The way they lay across the shaded steps, one on each, with their brightly coloured track tops off, made him think fondly of the bunk bed he’d once shared with his sister, Susan.
He drove to his appointment in a clapped-out sedan, its yellow shell zebra-striped with rust. According to his diary, he’d be spending much of the next week cleaning the Bronx apartment of a woman three years dead by the time anybody realized. It was impossible to know what to expect, his vast experience not equating to foresight. A number of regular contracts made up Peter’s bottom line. More often than not, if neighbours noticed a strange smell coming from next door and called the police, who found a decomposing body or sometimes even a skeleton – people who had died alone – someone called Peter.
Above all else, this line of work meant Peter understood loneliness beyond its dictionary definition, or even the sad twinge he sometimes felt, lowering his aching back onto a chilled mattress late at night. Loneliness as he knew it – in extremis – was decay, subsuming not just the person, but everything around them: the walls, the carpet and the air. He saw it every day, in a thousand grotesque manifestations. Floors that heaved with pregnant rats and inch-deep shelves of scum. Cobwebs spun round towers of plates and piles of rotting shirts. The unrelenting sadness of a solitary life.
As summer went on, Peter decided to take on an assistant, kidding himself that it might be the beginning of the business’s expansion, rather than a move born of his desire for company. He placed an advertisement in the local newspaper, half expecting it to come to nothing. The lady at the newspaper office laughed, rattling the earpiece of his telephone receiver.
‘You want an apprentice?’
‘I suppose.’
‘To clean up dead people?’
‘No, there are specialists who take care of that. I clean up whatever’s left behind.’
‘Don’t sound too appealing,’ the lady said. Peter imagined her grimace at the other end of the line and bristled.
‘Well, a successful applicant is going to have to come to terms with that pretty fast. Probably before they apply.’
‘Jeez. A lot of people want jobs, but . . .’
Placing the receiver back on the hook, he sat on the rug and conceded that the lady was right. It wasn’t an alluring prospect for anybody, even with unemployment figures at their highest since the Great Depression. The few school friends he kept track of – good, honest guys who’d grafted in steel manufacturing or automobiles – couldn’t get work holding half-price burger signs. The man on the street was being punished for the crimes of those with expensive cufflinks.
Maybe he wasn’t cut out to have a colleague. The more he thought about it, the more cleaning seemed best kept a solitary pursuit. Isn’t that what he enjoyed about it? This sense of it being him versus the task ahead. In front, the work to be done. Behind, the path of progress. There were so few signifiers of the route by which he’d stumbled through life – no marriage, no children – that the clean swathe through a grime-caked floor gave him a distinct high, or so he liked to tell himself. Lying awake at night, he wrestled with the notion of exposing another human being to the sights that regularly assailed him, least of all a young woman like Angelica Meek, the sole respondent to his advertisement.
Angelica met him outside a five-storey house on the Upper East Side of Manhattan early on a Monday morning. She watched him fumble with a bunch of keys, to find that the first seven he tried bore little relation to the shape of the hole in the door.
‘I’d ask if you want me to try,’ Angelica said, ‘but seeing as you’re my boss and this is my first morning on the job, I wouldn’t want to find the right key immediately and undermine you.’
‘I appreciate that. I think.’
Angelica was fresh out of beauty college. Her nails had tiny paintings of stars on them, her make-up was immaculate. She looked like Madonna, who, if Peter was perfectly honest, scared the shit out of him. Once he’d opened the door – if he could open the door – he reckoned on ten minutes before she quit.
‘Look, like I told you on the phone, it’s going to be horrible in there. I mean really grim. Mr Bertrecht died over two years ago and they didn’t even discover his body until
last week.’
‘How can that even happen?’
‘All that I’m saying is, this is going to be far removed from anything you’re used to. So I’m still not sure why you applied.’
‘I applied because I want the job.’ She snapped on a pair of rubber gloves.
‘You can be honest,’ he said, smiling so she might relax. ‘Is this one of those situations where your parents make you get a job to pay your way, and you just take anything you can find?’ She shook her head like she’d just realized he was an asshole. He realized how patronizing he was being and wanted to start the entire day again.
‘If you think it’ll save time you can drop the concerned uncle thing and we can get started,’ she said, with a smile crooked as lightning. He didn’t know many young women. Maybe they were all this full of attitude these days. All he knew was that he liked her. He was glad she had shown up, and sorry for what she was about to see.
It was a bad one. Mr Bertrecht had lived a life of solitude, squalid and adrift. Rot. Damp. Piss. Shit. An unpalatable cocktail of odours. The mulch of an enormous newspaper collection that spanned back twenty years, smelling of eggs and grease. Old newspapers were a frequent fixture in the houses of the undiscovered. All these people had was a past of which they were barely a part.
Angelica was stoical, even when the mattress split, spewing cockroaches like coffee beans. They carried the bed outside, pulled up the carpet, then took a break. She didn’t complain once.
‘Mr Bertrecht had weeds growing up the plughole in the kitchen sink,’ she said.
‘You see that a lot. You’d be surprised how quickly nature takes back a building if you leave it untouched. Flowers. Plants. Those things are powerful. And they ain’t like human beings either. They’re forever.’
She ran a gloved finger through a thick patch of grease clinging to her plastic overalls.
‘No, I wouldn’t be surprised.’
He was delighted, and ashamed to feel shocked, when she lasted until the end of the day.
The Long Forgotten Page 2
