The Optimists

by Andrew Miller

  ‘Afraid of the dark?’

  ‘Of what might come out of it.’

  ‘And what might?’

  ‘That’s for her to say.’

  ‘So you don’t know.’

  She snorted. ‘There are no secrets between us.’

  ‘You don’t think it’s information her family should have?’

  ‘You mean you and your father?’

  ‘And why are the windows sealed?’

  ‘For the same reason.’

  ‘Because she was afraid?’

  ‘Because of the illness! Have you understood so little?’

  They glowered at each other. In a fight, he thought, a physical fight, she would give a good account of herself, swinging those heavy arms. He could also imagine himself rushing her, kneeling across her, pressing his knuckles into her neck and choking the life out of her.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he said. He didn’t trust himself to stand so close to her. In the living room he saw that she had made up a sofa-bed for him. He thanked her.

  ‘Will you want collecting tomorrow?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ll call you,’ he said. ‘You’ll be at the university?’

  ‘Until four. I like to be at Ithaca by five thirty at the latest. I’ve left a set of keys on the kitchen table.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And there are tins in there. Some rice and pasta in the big jars. Or you can walk into the town. You won’t starve.’

  ‘I’ll be fine.’

  ‘I dare say.’

  He felt suddenly ashamed at how effortlessly they had made enemies of each other: a pair of children squabbling over a bag of sweets. ‘Would you like some tea?’ he asked, a conciliatory voice. ‘A drink of something?’

  She shook her head. ‘I have to go. I have her cats to feed.’

  They went into the hall together. She pulled fast the bedroom door and glanced around as if to see where else he might snoop. ‘And when you go out you’ll please remember to lock up properly. It takes two turns of the key.’

  ‘I’ll remember.’

  Vigorously, she drew the flaps of her coat together. ‘Clare will talk to you when she’s ready,’ she said.

  ‘Then I’ll have to wait.’

  ‘You can’t expect just to come back...’

  ‘I realise that.’

  She lingered in the doorway a moment, as though considering saying something definitive. Her mouth half opened, but she shut it again, nodded her farewell, and left.

  When she had gone he unsealed the kitchen window, stripping away yards of black insulating tape and forcing up the sashes until the sound of the evening traffic flowed into the room on a curl of cool, damp air. He closed his eyes and breathed in deeply. He was glad to be alone again, hidden up here in his sister’s flat. The place carried, of course, the memory of a descent, but carried it only faintly. The misery of it had gone with her to Ithaca; what remained were a few souvenirs of ingenuity and panic—the tape, the bulbs, the new steel bolt on the front door. Mounting the bolt would have needed the use of an electric drill. Did she have one? Or had she knocked at a neighbour’s door, some comfortable older man who, carrying up his tool-box, talked about a time when folk went out and left their latches off, a time with less fear? And had that same neighbour then returned to tell his wife there was something wrong with the woman upstairs, the university woman they had so approved of when she first moved in? It was not an unlikely scene. Unless it had been Fiacc who helped, Fiacc’s big fist turning the screws while Clare gazed on, half grateful, half appalled.

  He looked for something to drink and found in a cupboard next to the fridge a half-empty bottle of grappa, a price tag in lire on the side of it. He poured a couple of inches into a tumbler and carried the glass out to the bureau. The front of the bureau was folded down to make a writing board and at the back there was a network of little drawers and slots for envelopes and paper, ink, spare pens. The work she had been doing before she left was still there, a sheaf of annotated typescript, a finely sharpened pencil at the side of it. He began to read. It was an essay on Théodore Géricault, a painter she had talked to him about when they last met in London, a young Frenchman, a Romantic, but a Romantic obsessed with giving to his work a shocking new realism. For the painting of a disaster at sea, a notorious shipwreck off the West African coast, he had sketched in hospitals, visited morgues, even smuggled body parts into his studio in the hope that this butcher’s haul would infuse his painting with that quality of the authentic the first photographers, setting up their tripods in the Crimea and Gettysburg, would soon claim for their own. On first being exhibited—the Théâtre Français, 25 August 1819—the painting was considered a failure. Later it was admired. First title: Scene of a Shipwreck. Second title: The Raft of the Medusa. Clem looked for it among the photocopies clipped to the back of the essay. There were horses and wounded soldiers, a drawing of a sick old man on a bed, a pair of decapitated heads, a portrait entitled The Monomaniac of Stealing, but no shipwreck. Had Clare taken The Raft with her? He did not remember seeing it, but it might have been up in her room at Ithaca, something to remind her of work, the sanity of work.

  He slid the pages to one side, took a sheet of writing-paper and one of Clare’s pens and wrote a short letter to their father. He could have used the telephone, of course, it was just behind him, but a letter would arrive in a day or two, and on the phone his reassurances might sound too hollow, too easily chased down. He mentioned the clinic’s setting, the good facilities, the doctor’s optimism. Of Clare herself he said she had looked ‘sleepy’ but otherwise not too bad. She was in good hands, had a view over the garden and would, in time, be her old self. He did not write of his own plans; he did not have any. He signed, With love, Clem, found an envelope and a book of first-class stamps, put the envelope in his pocket and left the flat, turning the key twice.

  He posted the letter in a pillar-box at the corner of the road, then walked towards the town centre. In a small shop where a pair of young Chinese worked at bins of smoking oil, he bought a piece of fish, had it wrapped in a sheet of newspaper, and carried it back to the flat. He ate at the kitchen table, swilling the grease from his tongue with another mouthful of grappa, then took a shower. He did not intend to go out again. He left his clothes in a pile on the bathroom floor and crossed the hall to Clare’s bedroom. From its hook behind the door he took the robe and put it on, glimpsing himself—a flash of red and white—in the dressing-table mirror. The robe was tight across his shoulders but otherwise fitted him well. He went through to the living room and sat in the armchair, the grappa bottle and his cigarettes on the little table beside him.

  There was a television, an old bubble-screen portable. Finishing the drink, he watched a documentary about underwater volcanoes, an American comedy show, the last part of a detective drama. He smoked carefully, holding his hand under the dp of his cigarette to keep any sparks from burning the robe. He yawned: he had been awake since before five and had seen from the window of the guest room the island’s first hour of light. At breakfast, the old men with their diabetic jams and bowls of All-Bran had smiled at him, encouragingly. What was it they imagined him doing? Did they hope he would come to share their impossible religion? Or was something more general intended: live well, do what was right, be a force for the good? Having thought he would find them ludicrous he had ended up by liking them, their seriousness and their awkward domesticity. If they wished him well then he accepted their wishes—even their prayers.

  The detective drama ended with a confrontation, a lucky shot. When the credits ran he decided to move to the sofa-bed but when he woke, full of confusion, hours later, he was still in the armchair, the room spectral with the blue of the television. He had been dreaming that he was going into Clare’s room. There was no door, just a curtain which he drew back slowly with the point of a long-bladed knife he was carrying. Was it a scene from the film? He couldn’t remember. He climbed from the chair, switched off the television, and shuffled
into the kitchen. The travelling clock read four forty-five. He drank a glass of tap water looking out of the open window at the street-lamps, the lights of a small boat curving over the firth. Then he fetched his wallet from his trousers in the bathroom and stood under the hall light searching for the piece of paper on which he had written Silverman’s number. The phone was on a low threelegged table. He squatted beside it and dialled. There were several seconds of silence, then a ring tone, a burst of static, and finally a voice, friable, imperfect, remote as the Arctic, but distinctly Silverman.

  “Who is this?’

  ‘Clem. Clem Glass.’

  ‘Clem? Jesus! You tracked me down.’

  ‘Shelley-Anne said you were in Toronto.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Shelley-Anne!’

  ‘She’s fine. Well, she’s pretty mad at me, in fact. Thinks I’m going to stay up here.’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m driving.’

  ‘But what are you doing in Toronto?’

  ‘Starting again at the beginning.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The beginning. Christ, Clem. It’s taken me until fifty-two to discover the meaning of a word like “hope”.’

  ‘“Hope”?’

  ‘Maybe that’s not the word. Where are you?’

  ‘Dundee.’

  ‘Dundee, Scotland?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You sound like shit.’

  ‘It’s the line.’

  ‘You should be here. Don’t they have planes in Dundee?’

  ‘Not to Canada.’

  ‘I know how you feel, Clem.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I said I know how you feel. We made ourselves sick out there. When I got back I was afraid to sleep. I was dying.’

  ‘Dying?’

  ‘Trying nothing. Are you there?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘We made ourselves sick, Clem.’

  ‘I think about the little girl.’

  ‘Odette.’

  ‘The girl at the orphanage.’

  ‘I know, I know. And still they haven’t caught the bastard.’

  ‘Do you know anything?’

  ‘It won’t make any difference, Clem. We have to let go of all that.’

  ‘You’re wrong.’

  ‘We hang on to it and it’ll kill us.’

  ‘You’ve heard something?’

  ‘I’m not even looking. I’m out of it.’

  ‘What are you doing there?’

  ‘I’m working, but not what you think. I can’t even talk about it without sounding like Mother Teresa. One night you’ll come with me and I’ll show you.’

  ‘In Toronto?’

  ‘Huxley called it a sanctimonious ice-box but it’s not so bad. OK, listen, listen. I’m going into the underpass. Can you hear me?’

  ‘Just.’

  ‘To hell with history, Clem. To hell with politics. To hell with religion. To hell with newspapers. To hell...’

  The voice faded. Clem waited, straining towards a distant roaring of air; then the signal broke and he was returned to his surroundings, the hall, the rug under his feet, the first cries of the gulls. He dialled again and got the answer service. He left a short message then put a five-pound note on the table next to the telephone. He lay on the sofa-bed. The light grew stronger at the edges of the window. He drifted either side of sleep, thought of Silverman, then had a morning dream of him driving furiously through an orange-lit tunnel and out into a schoolbook Canada, the night sky blind with snow.

  It was broad daylight when he came to again. He dressed quickly, hung the robe behind the bedroom door, smoothing his shape out of the silk. He washed the glass, shut the kitchen window and left the flat, his bag over his shoulder. He reached the station a few minutes before ten. He waited there, sipping black coffee from a polystyrene cup, then caught the first train south.

  PART TWO

  Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks. All possibility of understanding is rooted in the ability to say no. Strictly speaking, one never understands anything from a photograph.

  Susan Sontag, On Photography

  10

  His food, some manner of pizza, had a bitter taste of burnt herbs, and he pushed it away. An Asian woman in a blue overall, ‘Food Village’ sewn over her breast, took his plate and tipped its contents into the bucket on her trolley. Her eyes, too, seemed to rebuke him. He turned to the windows. In the pearly light of mid-afternoon the planes stood gleaming at their gates. The PA announced flights to Islamabad, Chicago, Tokyo. Late passengers were sternly summoned; families reunited at the information desk. Again, Clem imagined making phone-calls, and again failed to imagine what he might say to anyone. Those who trusted him would need to trust him a little further. Wasn’t that part of it? Suspending judgement? Lending respectable motive to behaviour you could not understand at first, or perhaps ever? Somewhere in her poor abused head Clare would accept there was a reason he had not returned to her. But what had Fiacc said? Certainly she would have had no interest in defending him, and it was easy to picture her patting Clare’s hand, explaining how she had waited for his call then gone to the flat and found it empty, his bag gone, no note, nothing at all. She would be glad, of course. She had not wanted a rival, some never-before-seen brother who brought with him the claims of family. She had seen him off. Now Clare was hers again.

  Pitiful, though, to think of Clare listening to such stuff; pitiful to think of her face, the play of confusion there as she sought to make sense of Fiacc’s news. Could he send her a card? The idea was comically inadequate but he snatched at it as a course of action that fell within the narrowing range of what he still felt capable of, and immediately he went on to the concourse and found a carousel of postcards, buying one with a strange overcoloured aerial shot of the airport she might even find funny, or would have done in better times. He rested the card on a pile of magazines. He could write to her how he caught from his own skin still the sweet, continuous stink of decay. That she would smell it too in time. That he couldn’t help her. That he wanted to but couldn’t. That he was exactly the wrong person to try to help her. Instead, he wrote: Called away! In touch soon. Hi to Finola. He didn’t have a postal address but decided that ‘The Ithaca Clinic, Nr Dundee, Scotland’ would get there in the end.

  He flew Air Canada, the flight almost full, the man in the seat beside him passing the hours with little books of word-search puzzles. Clem watched the film, then ordered his fifth quarter of wine from a blonde stewardess whose youth and nervy attentiveness to the details of her work suggested it might be her first week in the job. The day extended. Below them, clouds darkening through a range of blues stretched away to perfect horizons. A moon rose, red with the light of the slowly setting sun, and for a while the world beyond the chill double-skin of his window was dreamlike, ideal, casually superb. He remembered Fiacc’s comment on the rainbow—‘It means nothing, of course.’ Strange, then, how persuasive it remained, how powerfully such beauty offered itself as the world’s deep character, the evidence of a moral order, profound, and profoundly good. He sat back. His neighbour went on with his puzzles, shaping lines with a biro around the words he found concealed in fields of letters. He exuded a sort of lunatic serenity. He had no interest in what the sky was doing.

  Clem read the in-flight magazine, cover to cover. Celebrity restaurants, socially minded businessmen, the continents bound in a cat’s cradle of flight lines: the heady conceit that Air Canada would ferry them between one shining culture and another. When he looked up again at the film screen a little schematic plane showed them poised at thirty-six thousand feet over the eastern seaboard of Canada. The first officer—a voice that might have done well selling bourbon or good cigars—invited them to alter their watches. It would be a fine evening in Toronto, clear skies, eighteen degree
s, a breeze from the west. Clem pillowed his head against the wing of his seat. The night at Clare’s had been followed by two more, equally disturbed, at the flat in London, and fatigue had him on the edge of a longer and longer drop. He had become fearful, panicky almost, that the rest he craved was lost to him for ever, but now, when there was no real time for it, the wine, the hum of the engines, the cabin’s twilight, drew him down, and he slept like a creature in its burrow until startled awake by the young stewardess tapping his shoulder and asking him to fasten his seatbelt.

  Fifteen minutes later they banked over grids of light. The man put away his books and biro. On the screen the plane stood over the city. The altitude dropped to five thousand, three thousand, fifteen hundred. Clem gazed down at the headlights of cars moving along a strip of road bounded by a darkness he took to be the darkness of water. He thought of the dead, how they crowded in among the living, thin as leaves. Was it they who had led him here? A host reciting their cause from broken mouths? Voice was all they had left to them. Stories, complaints sharpened on repetition. Pushing against stone or skin they could move nothing, but with their voices, their crooning, they recruited the living, though hid from them perhaps, as long as they were able, the nature of the justice they craved, the form, the sacrifice, the appetites that murder breeds.

  11

  He left a message on Silverman’s cellphone, giving the name and telephone number of the hotel he was staying at, an inexpensive thirty-room place on the edge of Chinatown called the Trillium Inn. The manager was a tall, lame man who looked like John Steinbeck in the Capa photograph taken in Russia in the 1940s. He gave Clem a complimentary map of the city and explained that the hotel’s air-conditioning had failed, for which he was offering a five-dollar-per-night reduction in the bill.

  In the morning Clem called Silverman again, though this time a recorded female voice informed him that the phone he wanted was switched off. (This, Clem understood, was the phone as a powerful means of not speaking to people, just as the camera was often a device for not looking at the world, a box to hide behind.)