by Nick Laird
As Glover and David approached the Eye, its lights came on suddenly, transforming it from the capital’s mill wheel to a fairground ride, a mega-Ferris. David looked up when they reached its base and swayed for a second under the vast rotation. The prospect of sailing above the city left him tiny and dizzy. Glover tugged at his sleeve: he’d spotted Ruth. She was standing with Bridget and Rolf by the entrance to the aquarium, and they made an uneasy group. Rolf had dirty blond hair, combed aggressively to the side, and a high forehead that he began to nod vigorously. Leaning his elongated frame against the Portland stone, he appeared to be agreeing with his girlfriend, who David could see from even twenty feet away-now fifteen, now ten-was exasperating her mother. Ruth’s head was inclined forward and she seemed to be staring at the shopping bags that petticoated Bridget’s legs. The daughter was a dark rejected second of the mother, hands dug into a maroon denim jacket she had customized with silver sequins.
When the two men arrived beside them Bridget kept on talking. David imagined she might hold a palm up to them as Ruth had done to the Chinese waitress, but not even that acknowledgement was made. Obediently, Glover and David stood delayed at the edge of convention. David felt he couldn’t just stare at Bridget without an introduction, so he turned away. Beside them a miniskirted gum-chewing teenager was holding a plush toy, a white baby seal. The father, talking softly on his mobile, his tweedy back to her, had bought it as some kind of compensation. She held it as if she was weighing it, and it was found wanting, and when two boys her own age walked past, David watched her slip it under her arm.
He turned back to Bridget, who welcomed him now with the tiniest widening of her eyes. They were the same sad-brown as her mother’s, but disdainful where Ruth’s were pleading. Her whole manner was tense, and David recognized such demeanour for the thing he witnessed every day: self-conscious youth in its ugly full bloom. Their presence jogged her to a finale:
‘…which is why Rolf and I know what our shit’s about. We’re not children.’
At this namecheck Rolf stopped leaning against the limestone and straightened up. His movements were distracting, gawky, goose-like. Ruth didn’t reply to her daughter but kissed Glover, then David, hello. David felt the brush of her emerald scarf as incredibly soft and her cheek as porcelain-cold. Continuing to grip his woollen fingers, forcing a brightness into her voice, she said, ‘Well, you two made it just in time. Any later and you might have missed Bridget scolding me. James, my darling daughter…Rolf…my friend David.’
Bridget shook her head dismissively. ‘Not scolding. Pointing out inconsistencies in your position. You want to get married. I want to get married. It’s called hypocrisy.’
The hair was dyed jet black and held in a ponytail by an ordinary rubber band: some strands weren’t long enough to make it and these were guided back behind her ears, repeatedly. As James bent to kiss her on the cheek, she ducked her head and held out a limp hand, quick enough that it might have been a genuine mistake.
They queued, shuffling along the narrow path trammelled by metal barriers. In his boredom, Glover would grip them like parallel bars and suspend himself half a foot from the pavement. Rolf watched him with an unblinking avian interest. After David’s first look at Bridget, he had precisely zero interest in chatting to her about teaching and was hoping the idea, like so many Ruth came up with, had been forgotten or shelved. He was pretty sure her daughter knew what a school was like, having attended one for fifteen years. However, rounding one of the barriers, when the conversation had fizzled out, he found himself standing between them.
Ruth smiled at him and said, ‘Oh Bridget, David’s agreed to have a talk with you.’
To be fair, Ruth had made it sound as though he’d offered to donate his one good kidney to her. Bridget stared coldly past him at her mother. ‘Why would we do that?’
Ruth didn’t react. There was no embarrassment, David sensed, to which her daughter had not already conditioned her. He found he was trying to absent himself physically from their conversation, pressing the small of his back hard against the metal bar.
‘I thought it’d be great for you to go into school with him. We thought maybe you’d like to sit in on one of his classes.’
Bridget turned to swap a glance with the human goose, but he was loading a film into his camera. A strand got tucked behind her ear.
‘I think I’m okay, thanks.’
‘Bridge’-Ruth’s tone was a mother’s again, too tired to go softly-‘if you’re going to drop drama after two and a half years to go and teach in inner-city Detroit or LA or wherever, after all your hopes of acting, then I think you should do some research into—
‘My hopes of acting…’ Bridget whispered. Ruth decided not to hear.
‘I just want you to go into this with your eyes open. There’ll still be teaching jobs when you’ve finished your degree. Maybe you could even major in education.’
David looked up and down the queue, which was beginning to tune in to their broadcast of radio drama.
‘Well,’ he said to cut through the thing, ‘why don’t we just meet for a sandwich Monday lunchtime? We don’t have to talk about teaching. I know I won’t want to. We could talk about anything. The Norwegian suicide rate. Cow-tipping.’
Bridget looked squarely at him, trying to work him out; then she smiled, a little abashed, David thought, and looked much younger than her twenty years.
‘Okay,’ she said.
Ruth flashed a smile at David. He had the impression she was assuming that if anyone could put Bridget off teaching for life, then he was that man. She seemed scared of her daughter, at pains not to upset her, but unable to abase herself to quite the extent Bridget required; in turn Bridget was illuminated by a thousand-watt resentment. They queued for less than fifteen minutes and David noted that her anecdotes were twice introduced with Ruth won’t remember this, but…
It was dark by the time they entered the glass pod and the door was lowered, sealed and bolted. There was a series of short rises and swinging stops as more pods were filled, and then they started ascending properly. David pressed his forehead against the glass. Rolf was explaining to Glover why 35 mil is still way better than digital. His voice was somehow wrong, a spy trying to pass for American. The luminous landscape unrolled in every direction, and the wheel kept rising until London was laid out around them, a litter of constituent parts and components nobody knew how to put back together. David’s forehead had left a smudge of grease against the glass and he wiped at it with his sleeve. Glover pointed out Cromwell Tower, where Ruth’s flat was, to Rolf, and he obediently took photographs in its general direction.
A seagull, angelically lit from below by the wheel, hovered in an updraught not far from the pod. David looked down with it along the flat river, at the scatter of buildings and chaos of lights. There was so much place- and all of it sparking and spilling and flickering into the mischief night. Modern life is the city: modernity has atomized society. The human now must move in Brownian motion, not in a shoal, not in a pack or a team or a herd, not in a chain. We don’t lie in family plots. We don’t work our father’s father’s land. Randomly, repeatedly, we knock against people, and spin off like particles elsewhere. How hard it was to form a bond, to stick. We have slipped our own collective nouns. He scribbled his thoughts into his Moleskine to post online later.
The wheel moved very slowly. Nothing was swung heavenwards, nothing cast to the abyss. After the first circuit David’s contemplation returned to the surface of things. He’d seen the city; he’d examined the other passengers; and by the second descent he was ready to exit. The others seemed to feel it too. David began talking to Rolf, who still toted his camera but with none of his earlier pep. He was nice and presented a happy, vaguely confused expression, as if he’d learnt that the only safe thing to do was smile. He’d grown up with German-speaking parents on a small farm in Missoula, in Western Montana-hence the accent-and David wanted to tell him to run for those hills. It was apparen
t that the driving force behind his engagement to Bridget was Bridget, and that their imminent wedding (though no date had been set) was a way of antagonizing her parents.
By the third revolution of the Eye, they had regrouped. Bridget was preparing herself for something: she resettled her shopping bags against Rolf’s forest-green corduroys. Her eyes shone.
‘So James, do you know what you’re going to do in New York?’
Glover tried to smile warmly; it came off as tepid, possibly hostile. ‘I thought I might do some voluntary work initially. And then your mum and I’ve talked about me working with her on large installations. I studied mechanical engineering, so I know a bit about—’
‘Volunteer work? Really? So what will you live off? Or, sorry-who?’
Ruth, conversant with Bridget’s strategies, wore a glazed calmness. But David could see her prospective father-in-law having difficulty not getting snagged on that little hook of Bridget’s half-smile. Glover turned, addressed his non-answer to Rolf.
‘Yeah, I looked some stuff up online. A lot of churches in Manhattan run outreach centres and mentoring programmes—’
‘Oh, don’t go through the Church. You’ll end up giving flyers out for Jesus,’ Bridget said, and then a short unhappy laugh escaped sideways from her mouth. The pod rocked faintly as it started a descent. Ruth laid a hand on Glover’s shoulder, and not for balance. Bridget said, ‘I’ve got some friends who run a drop-in centre in Harlem. I’ll get their details for you.’
David watched expectantly but Glover only nodded tersely. Sensing the opening, Rolf spoke very quickly: ‘Actually, Bridget and I were thinking of the Peace Corps for after we’re married.’
‘If I don’t start teaching right away,’ Bridget added.
The wheel was slowing down: a gigantic brake had been engaged somewhere. Ruth brightened. ‘I think that’s a very good idea. You’ll get to travel and—’
‘God, Ruth, it’s not about travel. It’s not about personal fucking development. It’s about helping people without inflicting our own religious and colonial impulses—’
The discussion continued as they were lowered, in uniform arcs, to the ground. Glover grew increasingly irate, his brow declining by millimetres, his voice more intense. The level of discourse, David felt, was fairly low-his debating team would have wiped the floor with either of them-but Bridget he was beginning to like. She was sequinned and fearless, a little bristler. As they tramped down the gangway to the pavement, she swung her shopping bags as though she might clobber someone with them if they came too close.
Goodbyes were said, and David saw her give Glover a peck on the cheek, which was progress of sorts. She seemed the type to be cheered by any interaction, even if it happened to be corrosive. They were off to see Stravinsky’s Pulcinella. David hadn’t been asked. He would get on with his marking and, as Glover was due in the Bell and Crown, they wandered back along the river eastwards. Before he clanged energetically up the metal stairway to the Embankment footbridge, Glover’s summation of Bridget was ‘some piece of work’. Watching him take the steps three at a time made David resolve to walk home, and he’d just reached the Blackfriars Road when he felt a drop of wet on his scalp. He stood under a bus shelter and watched. Localized to each lamppost’s pool of light, the rain fell in angled stacks. He waited but it kept on falling, and then a bus came and he got on.
Landfill
Gayle-with-a-Y hadn’t replied to the email he’d sent her that morning. He’d read her blog about the findings of the latest government inquiry and thought, just like the inquiry, that she’d utterly and deliberately missed the point. He left a comment as The Dampener, explaining how it was irrelevant if the idiot actually believed his own lies. If he did, then he was alone, and his sin lay in failing to listen. Culpability resides also in neglect. He can’t just decide he’s right. There are good books apart from the Bible. And, Mr Pride, here is your fall: his whole crooked pack should be brought before a war tribunal. Betray the mandate at your peril. Who does he think elected him? Twelfth-century crusaders? Esso? No, not even that. He thinks us insignificant.
Then David spent some time researching Gayle the Singleton properly. He found her address in Stockwell by searching the electoral roll online, then found her home phone number on 192.com. On the land registry site he found out how much she’d paid for her flat when she bought it two years ago. A trawl of a few medical journals turned up where she worked. Some photos of a work party on her colleague’s Flickr account showed her looking larger and a great deal drunker. He printed one off to remind himself of what she’d actually looked like, and then set another picture of her as his desktop, photoshopping the buffoons on either side of her out.
The next morning Glover arrived back at ten carrying several flattened cardboard boxes that he’d picked up in the Sainsbury’s off the High Street. He was going to start packing up his stuff, and seemed very matter-of-fact about the whole operation. The unmade boxes leant against the hallway wall all morning and every time David passed them he felt himself tense. He drove to his parents’ for lunch and when he returned three of the boxes were in a row in the hallway, filled and Scotch-taped. Glover’s books were gone from the living room, as were his DVDs. His huge QPR mug-for his morning pint of tea-had disappeared from the kitchen cupboard, his digital radio from the windowsill. Entering each room with trepidation, listing the small depletions of the flat, David knew what it was to be burgled. He lay beached on the sofa, taking it in.
Later, when he wandered down the High Street to buy something for dinner, a short, bespectacled, nondescript man passed him outside Specsavers, trailing an adult fox on a lead. A fox. On a lead. Red-furred, bushy-tailed, white-chinned, with the intelligent eyes and the haughty snout. David had seen weird things in Southwark before: an Indian man, thin as a rope, naked save for a tiny pink towel that didn’t quite meet at his hip; a greyhound strapped into a pushchair; an old woman who wore on one hand a glove puppet, a dirty grey monkey with two matted arms joined round her neck with Velcro paws. She had cornered him outside Tesco’s last summer and repeated into his face, her breath startlingly sweet with cider, ‘I know who you are. You’re one of them.’ David had responded-like Simon Peter-by denying it, and pushed past her with his shopping bags. And as he’d walked away he’d heard her shouting after him, ‘I’ve seen you. I know who you are. You’re one of them.’ Once he had crossed the car park, and got beyond range of that witchy, crumbling voice, it occurred to him to feel relieved that she hadn’t said what might have been more awful and more true: I know who you are. You’re one of us.
As for the fox on the lead, David gawked, recovered, and then tried hard not to read it as a symbol. One could believe in nothing, no guff about magpies or ladders or mirrors or gods, but still have a hankering. Allegories multiplied in his mind. The world seemed like a sequence of patterns that he was endlessly spotting, though the patterns themselves were unreadable. In another time he might have made a living as an interpreter of dreams, but now he caught himself, and looked away, and watched the exhaust fumes of an empty flatbed lorry at the traffic lights clamber upwards and dissolve. Glover was not a fox; Ruth was not a little man in horn-rimmed glasses and an anorak; marriage was not a choke collar.
On the Monday at lunchtime he met Bridget on the steps outside the school, where she was sitting smoking, a little ostentatiously, and listening to her iPod. She was reserved but polite, and David led her into the noisy canteen in the basement. It was very busy, and he became conscious of his students watching him with this unidentified young woman, so he suggested they nip around the corner to a sandwich shop that wasn’t colossally expensive. Bridget seemed less brittle when she was away from her mother. She didn’t have to play her role. London was kind of grey but their hotel in Covent Garden peachy. They had stayed up half the night watching movies and eating ice cream from the minibar. Rolf had loped off now to Tottenham Court Road to find some Xbox game where you could be an elf and defeat some defined and f
inal evil. Bridget thought that kind of stuff was so pointless, but then smiled to suggest it was just another sacrifice that lovers had to make. She was going to look for a summer dress after this. The way she said ‘after this’ made David remember their purpose. He’d been dumbly watching her, marvelling at how her eyes were just the same as Ruth’s, how her cheeks were convex where Ruth’s were scooped. Did she really want to teach? She nodded.
‘I really do. You know, Ruth doesn’t have the vaguest idea of what’s happening in our cities. I’ve seen some of those places. I’ve driven through them. You know what we spend on education? And what we spend on defence?’
Rather sweetly, David thought, she was conflating social justice with standing in a room full of ten or twenty or thirty young people whose sole job was to hate you. Had he been like that once? Shaking his head sorrowfully, David wiped some mayonnaise from the side of his mouth with an abrasive serviette and said, ‘But shouldn’t you finish at NYU first?’
She sniffed and her nose crinkled. That short nose, with a tiny fleshy bulb on the end, must have been a paternal gift. He watched the hollow at the base of her throat deepen as she spoke.
‘Actually, if I were to leave right now, I mean like tomorrow, I’d already have enough semester hours to make my teacher training just a year long, and if I stay for another year and a half it’s going to be the same.’
‘Aren’t you enjoying it?’
‘It’s…fine, you know. New York’s really pricey and living there can be pretty intense, and drama is very…competitive. I think Ruth expected me to be acting on Broadway by now’
