Spring

by David Szalay

  They left the primates and found a neglected-­looking structure that ponged very strongly of manure. It was not unlike the stink of Miller’s stables. Ostentatiously holding his nose, Omar wanted to leave. He wasn’t joking—­the overripe stench of sweet manure was too much for him. There were tears in his eyes as James ushered him out.

  It was quite a warm day—­the warmest of the year so far—­and Omar took off his parka. He was dressed exactly as Steve would be—­Converse trainers, soft jeans, lambswool jumper, parka with polyester-­furred hood. Essentially, James thought, taking the parka, the inmates of the zoo lived like the poorer human members of prosperous Western societies. Like them, they had to put up with miserable housing, monotonous food, persistent minor indignities. On the other hand, they wouldn’t die of starvation, or exposure, or waterborne diseases. If they were ill, medical professionals would take a look at them. No, it wasn’t perfect, but if you were eking out a terrifyingly insecure existence on a savannah somewhere, or in some jungle, you might take a second look at the zoo if offered a swap. The point was, he thought—­perhaps trying to persuade himself—­it was too simple just to pity the zoo animals. In many ways they were the lucky ones.

  Omar was now talking about some fish he had once seen—­they were odourless, perhaps that was their appeal—­but James did not know where to find them. They passed the insect house, which neither of them wanted to investigate. They had an ice cream. They saw a serval cat with ears like radio telescopes, staring with psychotic intensity at a pigeon which had flown into its walled enclosure—­there were portholes in the wall, through which the scene was visible.

  Then Omar saw the merry-­go-­round.

  As soon as he did, he lost all interest in the animals. James tried to explain that the world was full of merry-­go-­rounds; there would be time enough for them—­the animals were what they were there…

  Omar was now in tears. His puce face was like the sad mask of the theatre logo. The ends of his mouth were down by his chin. James had intended to tough it out, to at least make him look at one or two more animals before letting him loose on the merry-­go-­round. He felt that Omar should be more interested in animals than in merry-­go-­rounds, more interested in living things, our fellow tenants of time and space, than in tawdry machines. ‘Let’s just…’ he said, squatting to Omar’s level. ‘Let’s just have a look at one more…’

  It just wasn’t worth it.

  Tears pursuing each other down his empurpled face, Omar was making a lot of noise. People were starting to stare.

  ‘Okay,’ James said, ‘you can go on the merry-­go-­round.’

  Instantly Omar’s face was like the smiling mask of the theatre logo. He was living in the moment, there was no doubt about that. Holding the fibreglass neck of an undulating unicorn, he smiled at James as he went round. It was a smile which expressed an experiential purity quite elusive in later life—­probably that was why it was so lovely to see, why it possessed such an immense vicarious pull. Helplessly smiling himself, James waved. He was worried about what Omar would do when the music stopped and he had to dismount. In the event, he was fine. To, ‘Was that fun?’ he answered with a mature nod. He said he wanted to eat. And when they had eaten, he seemed to tire and said he wanted to leave.

  ‘But we’ve hardly seen any animals,’ James said, smiling. It was true. They had hardly scratched the surface of the place, zoologically, and James felt they ought to stay longer. Omar had no such feelings of obligation. James managed to tempt him into finding the lions, or rather the lion—­only one was visible, in her high-­security enclosure—­and then into a more immediate and much smellier encounter with the giraffes. The giraffes. Seeing them just standing there, being giraffes in the middle of London, James had an unprecedented sense of the strangeness of the world. As he and Omar left the giraffe house they were swept up in a stream of noisy, foul-­mouthed French schoolchildren whose intention it obviously was to terrify the animals in any way they could. They were upsetting Omar too. And indeed he was now more and more intensely keen to leave. Even the energetically pointed-­out okapi—­a strangely neglected creature, it looked like a misunderstanding in a medieval manuscript—­only held off the next wave of tears for ten seconds or so, and these tears were more despairing than the merry-­go-­round tantrum, with its all-­too-­obvious object, and emerged with long low-­pitched wails and howls that it seemed nothing would staunch.

  Except sleep.

  He fell asleep on James’s shoulders as they made their way out of one teeming zoo and headed towards the other, with its market and its lock, at the far end of Parkway.

  Later, sitting in Isabel’s orderly kitchen with a mug (Che Guevara) of Earl Grey while Omar told her what animals they had seen—­and he seemed more enthusiastic then, talking about them, than he had when they were there, seeing them—­James, for the first time, found himself envying his sister’s life. The tidy, well-­lit maisonette (lights on everywhere), Omar’s kindergarten daubs magneted to the fridge, the Volvo in the parking space outside (the Volvo that went to the two-­acre Sainsbury’s in Finchley every Saturday), the quietly up-­to-­the-­minute electronics everywhere, the sections of the Observer strewn on the sofa, where Steve had been lying after lunch, the Banksy prints in the hall—­it was all just so safe and warm and middle class, and sitting there in the kitchen, he felt an envious tug towards something like that. Yes, even towards its intrinsic predictability. Even its faint smugness.

  Omar was just telling Isabel about the merry-­go-­round when Steve appeared in the French windows, with frayed half-­moons trodden out of the heels of his jeans and plump pale little Scheherazade in his arms. They had been out on the Heath—­Scheherazade in her Bugaboo, Steve having a perambulatory script meeting with his friend Pete.

  ‘Alright, mate,’ he said.

  ‘Hi, Steve.’

  ‘How’s things?’

  James said things were fine.

  He phoned Katherine as he walked down the steep street, under the sheared, leafing elms. Voicemail. He left a message.

  *

  Emerging from the tube half an hour later, his hope was that she had tried him while he was underground. She had not. The disappointment was so surprisingly potent that he wished he had not phoned her in the first place. He had felt okay leaving Isabel’s house and now he didn’t. He felt very alone.

  3

  Philippa Persson thought it would take two days. First thing on Tuesday morning, the house was totally empty. A freshly painted, four-­bedroom void. They headed to Neasden in soiled, low sunlight. Katherine was driving. Philippa did not intend to tackle this on her own. She had enlisted her daughter to help.

  Kate seemed surprisingly down. She was wearing sunglasses and torn jeans. On Sunday evening they had spoken on the phone for two hours—­the Edinburgh post-­mortem. Philippa had been pleased to hear that it had been a failure, and pleased that Kate, on the phone, had sounded okay. She had sounded no more than wistful, the persistent numbness of Saturday having thawed to a tranquil sadness. The eight-­hour drive down to London, she said laconically, had not been much fun. The parting in Packington Street even less so. Fraser in tears. Philippa had permitted herself a quiet snort at that. She had never liked her son-­in-­law, had encouraged Kate to have nothing to do with him from the start, when he was still married to that other woman. Naturally she did not let on how pleased she was that the Scottish weekend had been a failure. She made sympathetic mooing noises while Kate said that in Edinburgh she had found Fraser tired, tedious, frightened, sad… Sad, she said, that was the worst thing. The way he was so sad. For her part, Philippa said things like, ‘Well, maybe it’s for the best…’ She said, ‘You tried, Kate. Now I think it’s probably time to move on…’ Time to move on… She had been saying that for more than a year. And now, thankfully, the whole thing did seem to be over. As Kate herself put it, ‘The love is dead.’ She said it quite simply. ‘The love is dead.’ That was just how it felt. The
sense she had was of silence, nullity, non-­existence. On Sunday night she was just pleased to be home and she slept well.

  On Monday morning she felt shockingly worse. There was a serious faltering of the idea that this was not something massively significant. She struggled through the day at work. In the evening she was supposed to meet some people, but the idea of pretending to be okay, of pretending to be interested in other things, was impossible. She went straight home.

  Tuesday. Still on a frighteningly steep downward trajectory. A terrible sense of futility. What was the point? The love was dead. In a way she was thankful that she had something mindless to do. Drive to Neasden. Push the obese trolley through Ikea wearing shades. Smoke in the car park under the huge suburban sky, the massing chrome-­fendered clouds. Whenever Philippa asked for her opinion, though—­These hand towels or those hand towels? Darling, which hand towels do you think… ?—­she just shrugged. She just muttered, ‘I don’t know.’

  She snapped, ‘Mum, I don’t know.’

  ‘Whatever,’ she said.

  She was thirty-­two. She felt half that.

  On Tuesday morning, they did Ikea. They did it. The long Peugeot estate was overloaded as it waddled onto the North Circular. And Philippa wasn’t just taking the first thing she saw. She would spend twenty minutes on the towels, ten on the toilet seats, half an hour on the light fittings. There were the soap dishes, the mirrors, the laundry hampers. The list of necessities seemed endless. Not everything was from Ikea. Over the next two days, many other shops were involved—­mostly in their vast, out-­of-­town interpretations, skirted with acres of parking space. John Lewis weighed in heavily, for instance. It was there that Katherine’s head started to throb as she was asked to look at forty different irons and make a decision. Two dozen toasters—­which was it to be? Do we need a pizza slicer?

  At two o’clock on Tuesday afternoon they unloaded the morning’s shopping at the house, where Katherine’s younger brother, Marc, an MBA student at the London Business School, was waiting for the various deliveries—­the fridge-­freezer, the washing machine, the sofas. The house was in West Kensington, past Olympia, the wrong side of the tracks. Nevertheless, Philippa was hoping for two thousand a week. That was why all the stuff had to be ‘nice’. Even the hoover had to be ‘nice’. (They found a nice one in John Lewis.) ‘Have you been smoking pot in here?’ she said to Marc, as she started down the stairs to the kitchen.

  ‘No…’

  ‘What’s been delivered?’

  ‘Nothing yet.’

  ‘Nothing? I’d better phone them.’

  While she made some sharp enquiries into the whereabouts of her things—­‘Yes, you said between eight and two. It’s now twenty past and there’s no sign of them…’—­Marc had found the Waitrose bag and was eating a lobster sandwich. Katherine was out on the patio smoking a Marlboro Light.

  That afternoon they spent mainly in John Lewis (an hour among the lamps, two among the linens), and it was dark—­in spite of Sunday’s shift to summer time—­when Philippa dropped her in Packington Street. ‘See you nice and early tomorrow,’ she said. ‘We haven’t even started on the living room yet.’ Kate waved at the parting Peugeot and unlocked the door. We haven’t even started on the living room yet… There was something depressing about those words. How much stuff was there in a house? And in every house. To imagine the same mass of stuff they had just spent the day so expensively and systematically marshalling in every house in London, in England, in Europe, in the world… It made her feel queasy and depressed.

  On Wednesday morning it was suddenly all too much. She had just parked the Peugeot in the John Lewis lot—­they were there again, with much to do—­when she found herself in tears.

  ‘Darling?’ Philippa said. ‘What is it?’ Philippa was not at her most assured in these situations. She put out a hand. ‘What is it?’

  Katherine shook her head.

  She had shed a few tears the previous night when, having let herself into the flat, she opened her mail. Among various other mailshots were two appeals for money. (Her small portfolio of monthly direct debits—­a sponsored orphan in Sri Lanka, the RSPB, Shelter—­meant that she was flooded with further appeals. The hungry, the persecuted, the terminally ill—­every day she hurried them into the plastic tub on the kitchen floor.) One was something to do with polar bears, whose unique and pathetic plight was well known. The other, orang-­utans. They were shamelessly sentimental. The polar-­bear one featured a picture of a sad-­looking mother and her young. The other was about an orang-­utan orphaned at only a few months old—­and thus presumably doomed—­in some sort of logging incident. They tried to make the point, those well-­meaning flyers, that while things were terrible, they were not yet hopeless. Weren’t they though? They seemed hopeless to her as she stood next to the table in the living room, shedding her few surprising tears. What was the point of even pretending? The straight line that led from how she had just spent the day to what was happening in the Arctic, in the Indonesian jungle—­what was left of it—­was too obvious to overlook, whether she wanted to or not. And it was equally obvious which was the stronger force, the stronger by many orders of magnitude—­those sentimental leaflets or the force they were up against. Her. Katherine Persson. She was the stronger force, and there was simply no way it was going to be stopped.

  She filled in the forms and set up two new direct debits—­a total of £10 a month. And just that day she and her mother had added a thousand times that to the strong force. (And what was that, if not a mammalian mother single-­mindedly providing for her young? The house in West Kensington, with its hundred and ten per cent mortgage, its wealthy tenants, was intended as a sort of trust fund for Katherine and Marc.) Yes, it was hopeless. Nevertheless, she went to the pillar box on Essex Road and posted the forms. She did not do it thinking it would make a difference. It was just her way of saying that she knew what she was doing, she understood, she felt terrible. But she wouldn’t stop doing it. She just didn’t want to enough.

  Setting off the very next morning to add another £10,000 to the strong force was, however, too much. As she switched off the engine, she lowered her head. Tears fell onto the steering wheel.

  ‘Darling?’ Philippa said. ‘What is it?’

  And of course it wasn’t just the poor, puzzled species being steadily shunted into oblivion, being shunted out of existence without ever understanding what was happening or why. (And they would do the same to us. We were just doing what any animal would.) It wasn’t just the hopelessness of that situation. That was there all the time. It was a much more personal hopelessness, of which that was nothing more than an echo. The love was dead. It was dead. She did not love him any more. The terrible thing was she did not love him any more.

  *

  It was still those memories. The hotel that week in October. The tambour of her heart. The flat in Battersea that first night. The lift in the morning—­‘I’m in love with you.’ The experience had acquired a definitive quality. It had turned into a definition of what love was. She had thought, that October—­Yes, this is what people mean when they talk about love. She had previously been in love once or twice. Fraser was not the first. And those experiences were not nothing. They were still important to her. In some significant way, though, they were lesser. With them, she had not felt with the same heart-­walloping surety that this was what people meant when they talked about love. There were moments there which seemed qualitatively different from everything else in her life. They would be the moments she thought of at the end. They would be the things she thought of at the end of her life. In a sense, they were her life. Specific moments, mostly from that first week, or the first few weeks, or the first few months. When she tried to write them down, however, they had none of their force. Writing them down, trying to transcribe them, made them seem mundane, normal. Nothing special. She stopped trying. What was the point anyway? Only that she wrote down everything else, so it seemed strange that the mos
t important, the most significant things were not there.

  It was still those memories. It seemed impossible that any other man would ever be able to lessen their importance. Even if she were to have a similar experience with someone else in the future, which was not impossible, what it would lack would be the feeling that it was unique, that it was the final word. It would be hard to have that kind of faith in any feeling in the future. When she said, ‘The love is dead,’ she had a terrible sense that what she was in fact saying was, ‘For me, love is dead.’ She wondered whether her experience of this was unusual, or whether it had just happened to her unusually late in life. (She had started sleeping with men unusually late in life, after all, not until she was twenty.) Did most people have an experience like this, she wondered, when they were much younger—­in their early twenties, even in their teens?

  Those memories.

  She was unable to escape the sense that the most intense love of her life was now in the past. The love was in the past. The love itself was in the past—­she no longer felt it, not even in a lesser, hugely watered-­down form. She no longer felt it. It no longer existed. In Edinburgh she had wondered why she had once loved Fraser. It didn’t even seem to make sense any more.

  The love is dead…

  For me, love is dead…

  She had perhaps known, the whole time she thought she wanted to stop loving Fraser, that this was the situation she would find herself in if she ever did. It seemed she had staked everything on him, and now she had nothing left for anyone else. Perhaps that was why she never truly did want to stop loving Fraser. And it had been easy—­it had been easy not to stop loving him—­when he wasn’t there. She thought of the words of that poem—