by Rich Horton
I ask after my brother.
Dad smiles his sorry little smile, “It’s been good for him, I think, today. The rest. Reading in the sun.”
“I’m glad.”
The old man leans and spits a benediction on my forehead. “And you?”
In an empty cinema, seats lower themselves in readiness for their customers.
An orchestra sits, frozen, the musicians as poised as shop dummies, freighted with uncanny intent.
Two needles approach each other. Light sparks and blooms between their points, filling the screen.
A cameraman lies across a railway track, filming the approach of a locomotive. The man rolls out the way of the train at the last second but one foot still lies across the rail. Carriages whizz and rock and intersect at all angles: violent, slicing motions fill the screen.
A young woman starts out of nightmare, slides from her bed and begins to dress.
I paused the video (this was years ago, and we were deep in the toil of our country’s many changes) and I went into the hall to answer the phone. My brother, Ned (all hale and hearty back then, with no taste for apples and no anxiety about bees), had picked up an earlier train; he was already at Portsmouth Harbour station.
“I’ll be twenty minutes,” I said.
Back in those days, Portsmouth Harbour station was all wood and glass and dilapidated almost beyond saving. “Like something out of Brief Encounter,” Ned joked, hugging me.
1945. Trevor Howard holds Celia Johnson by the waist, says goodbye to her on just such a platform as this.
We watched many old films back then, and for the obvious reason. Old appetites being slow to die, Ned and I craved them for their women. Their vulnerable eyes, and well-turned calves and all the tragedy in their pretty words. A new breed of state censor, grown up to this new, virtually womanless world, and aggressive in its defence, was robbing us of female imagery wherever it could. But even the BBFC would not touch David Lean.
Southsea’s vast shingle beach was a short walk away. The rip-tides were immense here, heaving the stones eastwards, and impressive wooden groynes split the beach into great high-sided boxes to conserve it.
In his donkey jacket and cracked DMs, Ned might have tumbled out of the old Russian film I’d been watching. (A woman slides from her bed, naked, and begins, unselfconsciously, to dress.) “We’re digging a villa,” he told me, as we slid and staggered over the shingle. Ned was the bright one, the one who’d gone away to study. “A bloody joke, it is.” He had a way of describing the niceties of archaeological excavation—which features to explore, which to record, which to dig away—that made it sound as if he was jobbing on a building site. And it is true that his experiences had weathered and roughened him.
I wondered if this modest but telling transformation was typical. We rarely saw our other brothers, many as they were. The three eldest held down jobs in the construction of the London Britannia airport; back then just ‘Boris Island’, and a series of towers connected by gantries, rising out of the unpromisingly named Shivering Sands. Robert had moved to Scarborough and worked for the coast guard. The rest had found work out of the country, in Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur and poor Liam in Dubai. The money they sent back paid for Ned’s education, Dad’s plan being to line up our family’s youngest for careers in government service. I imagined my brothers all sun-burnished and toughened by their work. Me? Back then I was a very minor observations man, flying recycled plastic drones out of Portsmouth Airport on the Hampshire coast. This was a government job in name only. It was locally run; more of a vigilante effort, truth be told. This made me, at best, a very minor second string in Dad’s meticulously orchestrated family.
It did, though—after money sent home—earn me enough to rent a conversion flat in one of those wedding cake-white Georgian terraces that look out over Southsea’s esplanade. The inside was ordinary, all white emulsion and wheatmeal carpeting, until spring came, and sunlight came blazing through the bay window, turning the whole of my front room to candy and icing sugar.
“Beautiful.”
It was the last thing I expected Ned to say.
“It’s bloody beautiful.”
“It’s not bad.”
“You should see my shithole,” Ned said, with a brutal satisfaction.
At the time I thought he was just being pretentious. I realise now—and of course far too late—that brute nil-rhetoric was his way of expressing what was, in the millennial atmosphere of those post-feminine days, becoming inexpressible: their horror.
I do not think this word is too strong. Uncovering the graves of little girls, hundreds and hundreds, was a hazard of Ned’s occupation. Babies mostly; a few grown children though. The business was not so much hidden as ignored. That winter I’d gone to Newcastle for a film festival; the nunneries there had erected towers in the public parks for people to leave a child. Babies survived at least a couple of days, exposed to the rain and cold. Nobody paid any attention.
Ned’s job was to enter construction sites during the phase of demolition, and see what was to be gleaned of the nation’s past before the construction crews moved in, turfing it over with rebar and cement. Of course the past is invented, more than uncovered. You see what you are primed to see. No one wants to find a boat, because boats are the very devil to conserve and take an age to dig, delaying everyone. Graves are a minor problem in comparison, there are so many of them. The whole of London Bridge rises above the level of the Thames on human bones.
Whenever his digs struck recent graves, Ned’s job was to obliterate them. Hence, his pose: corporation worker. Glorified refuse man. Hence his government career: since power accretes to those who know—in this case, quite literally—where the bodies are buried.
Why should it have been women, and women alone, that succumbed to the apian plague—this dying breed’s quite literal sting in the tail? A thousand conspiracy theories, even now, shield us from the obvious and unpalatable truth: that the world is vast, and monstrously infolded, and we cannot, will not, will not ever know.
And while the rest of us were taken up with our great social transformation, it fell to such men as Ned—gardeners, builders, miners, archaeologists—to deal with the sloughed-off stuff. The bones and skin.
Not secret; and at the same time, not spoken of: the way we turned misfortune into social practice, and practice, at last, into technology. The apian plague is gone long since, dead with the bees that carried it. But, growing used to this dispensation, we have made analogues for it, so girls stay rare. Resources shrinking as they do, there’s not a place on earth now does not harbour infanticides. In England in medieval times we waited till the sun was set then lay across our newborn girls to smother them. Then, too, food was short, and dowries dear.
Something banged my living room wall, hard. I turned to see the mirror I had hung, just a couple of days before, rocking on its wire. Another blow, and the mirror rocked and knocked against the wall.
“Hey.”
My whole flat trembled as blow after blow rained down on the wall.
“Hey!”
Next door was normally so quiet, I had almost forgotten its existence. The feeling of splendid isolation I had enjoyed since moving in here fell away: I couldn’t figure out who it could be, hammering with such force. Were they moving furniture in there? Fixing cupboards?
The next blow was stronger still. A crack ran up the wall from floor to ceiling. I leapt up. “Stop it. Stop.” Another blow, and the crack widened. I stepped back and the backs of my knees touched the edge of the sofa and I sat down, nerveless, too disorientated to feel afraid. A second, diagonal crack opened up, met a hidden obstacle, and ran vertically up to the ceiling.
The room’s plaster coving, leaves and acorns and roses, snapped and crazed. A piece of stucco fell to the floor.
I didn’t understand what was happening. The wall was brick, I knew it was brick because I’d hung a mirror on it not two days before. But chunks of plasterboard were peeling back under
repeated blows, revealing a wall made of balled-up sheets of newspaper. They flowed into the room on top of the plasterboard. Ned put his arms around me. I was afraid to look at him: to see him as helpless as I was. Anyway, I couldn’t tear my gaze from the wall.
Behind the newspaper was a wooden panel nailed over with batons. It was a door, or had been: there was no handle. The doorframe had split along its length and something was trying to force it open against the pile of plasterboard and batons already piled on the carpet. The room filled with pink-grey dust as the door swung in. The space beyond was the colour of old blood.
From out of the darkness, a grey figure emerged. It was no bigger than a child. It came through the wall, into my room. It was grey and covered in dust. Its face was a mask, strangely swollen: a bladder pulling away from the bone.
She spoke. She was very old. “What are you doing in my house?”
My landlord came round the same evening. By then Ned and I had gathered from his grandmother—communicating haphazardly through the fog of her dementia—that my living room and hers had once been a single, huge room. Her property. The house she grew up in. The property had been split in half years ago; long before my half had been subdivided to make flats.
The landlord said: “She must have remembered the door.”
“She certainly must have.”
He was embarrassed, and embarrassment made him aggressive. He seemed to think that because we were young, his mother’s demolition derby must have been partly our fault. “If she heard noises through the wall, it will have confused her.”
“I don’t make noises through the wall. Neither am I going to tiptoe around my own flat.”
He took her home. When they were gone Ned and I went to the pub. We drank beer (Old Speckled Hen) and Ned said: “How many years do you think they left that poor cow stranded there, getting steadily more unhinged?”
“For all I know he’s round there every day looking after her.”
“You don’t really believe that.”
“Why not?” I looked at my watch. “He probably thinks it’s the best place for her. The house she grew up in.”
“You saw what she was like.”
“Old people know their own minds.”
“While they still have them.”
Back home, Ned went to bed, exhausted. I brought a spare duvet into the living room for myself, poured myself a whisky and settled down to watch the rest of Man With a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929.) When it was over I turned off the television and the lamp.
The hole in my wall was a neat oblong, black against the dim grey-orange of the wall. Though the handles had been removed, the door still had its mechanism. The pin still just about caught, holding the door shut against its frame. Already I was finding it hard to imagine the wall without that door.
I went into the kitchen and dug out an old knife, its point snapped off long before. I tried the knife in the hole where the handle had been and turned. Pinching my fingertips into the gap between the door and the frame, I pulled the door towards me.
The air beyond tasted thick, like wax. The smell—it had been lingering around my flat all day—was her smell. Fusty, and speaking of decay, it was, nevertheless, not unpleasant.
A red glow suffused the room. Light from a streetlamp easily penetrated the thin red material of her curtains: I could make out their outline very easily. The red-filtered light was enough that I could navigate around the room. It was stuffed full of furniture and the air was heavy with furniture wax. A chair was drawn up in front of a heavy sideboard, filling the space created by a bay window.
I ran my hand along the top of the sideboard. It was slick and clean and my hand came away smelling of resin. In her confusion, the old woman had still managed to keep her things spotless—unless someone had been coming and cleaning around her.
How many hours had she spent in this red, resined room? How many years?
I pulled the chair out of the way—its legs dragged on the thick rug—and opened a door of the sideboard.
It was filled with jars, and when I held one up to the red light coming through the curtains, the contents admitted one tawny, diagonal blear before resolving to black.
Dad was all for clearing out the lot. He had a van, his man could drive, they’d be in and out within the night. Such were the times, after all, and what great family is not founded on the adventures of a buccaneer?
But I had a youth’s hope, and told him no: that we should play the long game. I can’t imagine what I was thinking: that they would show some generosity to me, perhaps, for not stealing their property? Ridiculous.
Still, Dad let me have my head. Still, somehow, my gamble paid off. The landlord, whose family name was Franklin, hardly showered me with riches, but he turned out friendly enough, and the following spring, at his grandmother’s funeral, I met his daughters.
The match with Belinda—what a name!—was easy enough to arrange. The dowry would be a generous one. Pear orchards and plum trees, hops and brassicas and the young men to tend them. The whole business fell through, as I have said, but the friendship between our families held. When Ned ran into political trouble he gave up his career and came home to run things for Dad. It was to him Franklin gave his youngest child, my nephews’ mum. (Melissa. What a name.)
The rest is ordinary. Ned has run our estate successfully over the years, has taken mistresses and made some of them wives, and filled the house with sons. Of them, the two eldest are my special treasure, since I’ll have no kids myself. Every once in a while a brother of ours returns to take a hand in the making of our home. They bring us strange stories; of how the world is being set to rights. By a river in the Minas Gerais somewhere, someone has reinvented the dolphin. But it is orange, and it keeps sinking.
Poor Liam’s still languishing in Dubai, but the rest of us, piling in to exploit what we collectively know of the labour market, have done better than well.
As for me: well, what with one promotion and then another, this offshore London Britannia airfield has become my private empire. Three hundred observation drones. Fifty attack quadcopters. Six strike UAVs. There are eight thousand miles of coastline to protect, a hungry neighbour to the west famining on potatoes; to the east, a continent’s-worth of peckish privateers. It is a busy time.
Each spring we all pile back onto the estate, of course, to help with pollination. Tinkerers all, we experiment sometimes with boxes of mechanical bees, imported at swingeing cost from Shenzhen or Macao. But nothing works as well as a chicken feather wielded by a practised hand. This is how Ned, the scion of our line, came to plummet from the topmost rung of his ladder. The sons he had been teaching screamed, and from where I sat, stirring drying pots on the kitchen table, the first thing that struck me was how they sounded just like girls.
Dad leads me in. Much fuss is made of me. The boys vie with each other to tell their little brothers about the day, the airfield, the mayor. While Dad’s women are cooing over them, I go through to the yard.
Ned is sitting where he usually sits on sunny days like these, in the shelter of the main greenhouse, with a view of our plum trees. They, more than any other crop, have made our family rich, and it occurs to me with a lurch, seeing my brother slumped there in his chair under rugs, that it is not the sight of their fruit that has him enthralled. He is watching the walls. He is watching the gate. He is guarding our trees. There’s a gun by his side. A shotgun. We only ever fill the cartridges with rock salt. But still.
Ned sees me and smiles and beckons me to the bench beside him. “It’s time,” he says.
I knew this was coming.
“I can’t pretend I can do this anymore. Look at me. Look.”
I say what you have to say in these situations. Deep down, though, I can only assent. There’s a lump in my throat. “I haven’t earned this.”
But Ned and I, we have always been close, and who else should he turn to, in his pain and disability and growing weakness? Who else should he hand the busine
ss to?
The farm will be mine. Melissa. The boys. All of it mine. Everything I ever wanted, though it has never been my place to take a single pip. It is being given to me freely, now. A life. A family. As if I deserved it!
“Think of the line,” says Ned, against my words of protest. “The sons I’ll never have.”
We need sons, heaven knows. Young guns to hold our beachheads against the French. Keepers to protect our crop from night-stealing London boys. Swords to fight the feuds that, quite as much a marriage pacts, shape our living in this hungry world.
It is no use. I have no head for politics. Try as I might, I cannot think of sons, but only of their making. Celia Johnson with a speck of grit in her eye. Underwear and a bed of dreams. May God forgive me, I am that depraved, my every thought is sex.
Ned laughs. He knows, and has always known, of my weakness. My interest in women. It is, for all the changes our world’s been through, still not an easy thing, for men to turn their backs on all the prospects a wife affords.
“Pick me a plum,” my brother says. So I go pick a plum. Men have been shot for less. With rock salt, yes. But still.
I remember the night we chose, Ned and I, not to raid the larder of the poor, confused old woman who had burst into my room. Perhaps it was simply the strangeness of the day that stopped us. (We stole one jar and left the rest alone.) I would like to think, though, that our forbearance sprang from some simple, instinct of our own. Call it decency.
It is hard, in such revolutionary times, always to feel good about oneself.
“Here,” I say, returning to my crippled benefactor, the plum nursed in my hands.
Ned’s look, as he pushes the fruit into his mouth, is the same look he gave me the night we tasted, ate, and finished entirely, that jar of priceless, finite honey. Pleasure. Mischief. God help us all: youth.
Ten, twelve years on, Ned’s enjoying another one-time treat: he chews a plum. A fruit that might have decked the table of the mayor himself, and earned our boys a month of crusts. He spits the stone into the dust. Among our parsimonious lot, this amounts to a desperate display of power: Ned knows that he is dying.
