by John Samuel
Ants – I ask you. My poor sweet Maryam, she deserved better. She was no angel, I’m sure (join the club) but whether she was an actual working prostitute before I met her, who can say? Certainly not that old masochist Philip. She never spoke a word to me about any of that, not about her life in Magdala, not about what she did when she wasn’t with me, and I never thought to ask. Why? Because, to be perfectly honest, it couldn’t have mattered less to me. And nor should it to anyone else. Shame on those who care. What does matter is that we found each other and we shared something, something transcendent. Everyone else can just go ahead and think what they like.
I extract the phone from where it’s wedged in my pillow. The moment I lift it up, it goes dark in my hand, a candle that’s just blown out.
‘Mē mou haptou,’ my mouth says, addled and sideways.
My thoughts are woozy, scattered on a warm wind. A zephyr. I say it, zephyr, blowing the sound warm and soft as the thing itself, through my teeth and into the pillowcase. I hum a tune I heard once – zefiro, zefiro, torna, zefiro.
One half-open eye shows me Will’s electronic appliances winking their little lights of standby from the shadows.
I am the commander of a vast army, gazing out at a blackened horizon, where signal fires send messages of victory and allegiance.
I am change.
I am love.
So eager was I to be awake that not even the ballast of those pills could hold me under for long. I watched the sunrise from a cold, hard perch on the kitchen counter, my legs drawn up against me, inspecting every detail of the street beneath my window. The transfusion of colour into the monochrome dusk, announcing by degrees the presence of a crimson Coke can in the gutter, the sharp blue lettering on the side of a parked van. Even the smudged brickwork and roof slates of the houses revealed veins and glints of new shades. Brought to life from darkness. I wept a little – joyful tears – at the sight of this new day being born around me, for me, with me. Fiat lux.
Now, having stepped out of a long, hot shower, that joy has hardened into something more substantial. An earth-riveted certainty of belonging surges through me now as I roam through these rooms, towel around my waist, still beaded with water. My chest is full, barrelled, armoured with light. My arms are knotted twists of sinew. My mind is a limpid pool.
I stop and howl at the top of my lungs, like a wolf does, chin up, mandible jutting. How-how-hoooo!
It is so intoxicating to be in this second then tilted into the next and the next. I keep on moving and howling and growling and beating my chest, until I decide to stop on the kitchen lino and sprint on the spot. The room shakes with my efforts and the house keys and water glass drift on these vibrations towards the edge of the table.
That’s when I realise that I need music. This energy must be structured, it must be guided. All I have to do is dock Will’s iPhone into the little speaker cradle and … voilà!
What comes blasting out is simply delicious. I have no idea what it is called but its languorous rhythm soon builds into something more assuredly percussive, pulling me away from the snake-hipped gliding of my first dance into an atavistic trance. It is while I am stomping in this ape-like funk that I hear the sound of Alice Sherwin hammering on my door. Almost immediately, as if responding to this intrusion, the music reverts to its early tempo, sleek and sinewy, and I find my body mirroring the change, unjointed, eely in its contortions as I slither and slide towards the door.
The cold draught that comes with the opening of the door makes me realise that I must have lost my towel somewhere in the flow of my dancing. Unabashed, and unable to remain still, I continue gyrating. The Sherwin woman seems unable to find her words. The most she has yet managed is the syllable I. Shimmying a half step towards her, one hand at waist level, the other reaching for her shoulder, I invite her to join me in my celebration of music, of life itself.
She draws back but does not, this time, turn away. She looks determinedly at my face, but in a way that avoids any contact with my eyes. Her attention is focussed on a spot in the centre of my forehead.
‘You are ruining my life,’ she says so bleakly that it stops me in my tracks. It is a sentence shorn to the bone.
The music continues to pound but I find myself suddenly motionless in the doorway. Her face is arid, drained of all expression.
The door remains open as I hurry back inside and stop the music. I pick up my towel from the floor and re-skirt myself. She is still there, a dry cactus of hatred.
‘I am so sorry,’ I tell her as I approach, respectfully this time, cautious of the despair I/Will have been causing.
I want very much to hug her. There is something profoundly vulnerable about her primly belted dressing gown. Perhaps my expression or my stance betrays these thoughts because she takes a definite and exaggerated step back from me. A parlour game in reverse, with me, the shamed and chastened Mr Wolf, left to drop my head and stare at the splay of my toes on the floorboards.
She says, ‘I am keeping a diary of your behaviour.’
I have no reply. It is clear that she is beyond my reach.
‘For the police,’ she states tonelessly, for the record, before departing the scene.
I find my tongue again only after she has gone and I have heard the vague sound of her own front door being quietly closed.
‘I’ll make it up to you,’ I promise.
After that, as I am looking through the rack of Will’s suits, deciding which fabric might complement which shirt, taking my time with it (the textures so delicate on the fingers, the cut of the cloth so sharp, the stitching so close and precise), I am still saying this under my breath. Make it up to you.
In between mouthfuls of breakfast (the remaining spaghetti hoops, chocolate biscuits, a quarter wedge of lemon) I convert it into something more like a little song. Making it, making it, making it up.
It is only when I realise I have wasted a full hour on all of this that I decide to continue in a more organised silence. Tick, tick, tick says the watch on my wrist as I sift through the papers next to Will’s printer. I saw something here on that first day, I’m certain of it, some mention of Jersey. Tick, tick as I continue to look.
‘Silence,’ I tell it. But it doesn’t stop.
Tick, tick.
I unstrap it from my wrist and take a closer look at the dial. I shake my head at the offending hand mindlessly ticking its way around.
‘Time is not there to be minuted,’ I say.
And yet still it persists, tick after entitled tick, bossing the day into pedantic little units, warehousing the accumulated hours in a swivel-roll of calendar numbers.
‘No – I don’t think so.’ I tell it, with a bitterness that surprises me.
I march through to the kitchen. I am not here to count off the days. Time is a gift, a thread that is quietly drawn from us. I lay the watch out on the table.
‘We each contain our invisible spool,’ I remind it. Delicately, I smooth flat the platinum links of its strap. ‘None of us knows that the end has slipped free until the very moment we are undone.’
I turn it a quarter-rotation clockwise so that it is precisely in line with the grain of the wooden table top, then I lean down and remove my shoe.
‘It is a miracle, a living mystery.’ I raise the shoe high above my head. ‘It should not be debased into units. People’s lives are more than just the sum of hours and weeks.’
I smash its face in with three quick, powerful blows.
I watch its second hand, curled upwards by the impact, quiver in place, paralysed above a silver seven. I stare at it for I do not know how long. Until I am ready to stop.
7
I am on the train to Gatwick, looking out of the carriage window. I have been doing little else since we set off from the station, trying to absorb every little detail as it speeds by, so much so that my eyes are now beginning to ache. I decide to rest them and turn my attention instead to this piece of card that I have retrieved from my jacket pocket
and am now holding in my loosely laced fingers.
I turns out that I was right, I had seen something with a mention of Jersey in Will’s flat, it just hadn’t been anything useful, and nor had it been among the papers next to his printer – it was here, on this card. That stuff he had printed out was just junk. I can say that with such authority because I spent a good hour looking through it all (there were two precarious stacks about a foot high). It was nothing but reams of pointless conjecture and guess work spewed out from various websites, about the lives of Jesus’ so-called apostles (always makes me laugh, that, with its suggestion they were somehow there to help me, which they most certainly were not; they were there to serve their own, highly individual needs) and, a little creepily, about Mary too (that’s to say, my Mary, not JC’s poor disturbed mother who trailed round telling everyone that God himself had planted an infant in her womb). It was quite striking actually, seeing it all pulled together like that, my supporting cast, I mean – it made it a lot easier to see how I wound up dangling on that cross. They weren’t exactly the most baggage-free crowd, let’s say, with their broken lives and their histories of violence and mental illness.
But as I said, I was barking up the wrong tree sifting all that junk. In the end, I found the word Jersey in a small print address right at the bottom of this stiffly formal invitation, which had been taped to the door of the fridge. Our new address: La Fin de Chasse, Rue de Châtaigne, Grouville, Jersey, JE2 3GF, it says. I had to do a sweep of the whole flat before I spotted it, using the soft eyes (not really looking, if you know what I mean, just letting the brain do its CPU thing), and there it was, stuck to the fridge, virtually engulfed by all the other scraps that Will had collected together and taped up there. An invitation to a reception at St John’s College, Cambridge, to commemorate the retirement of one Augustus Lemprière. So hardly worth searching for, then, let alone stuffing into the pocket of Will’s jacket, which is what I did nonetheless. But now that I’m reading it, I’m naturally a little curious, as to why, for example, Will still had this invitation taped to the door of his fridge when I see here that the party was in June last year. Perhaps he meant to go and felt guilty for not getting around to it, kept the card there to remind him to write or send a gift. I guess I’ll never know. What I can find out, though, thanks to the magical tablet of this iPhone is something about Augustus Lemprière.
He has, it turns out, earned himself a lengthy Wikipedia entry. He was a fellow of St John’s College before retiring last year to the Channel Island of Jersey, the place of his birth. There are other scant biographical details – he has a wife, children, a brother, Ernest, also listed by Wikipedia, who acquired the rank of Lieutenant General in the British Army – but the bulk of what is written about him focuses on what is described variously as his influential, pioneering and seminal research in biomathematics and, in particular, molecular set theory. The Lemprière model of wide-sense chemical kinetics is described as the foundation on which much of the current mapping of individual molecular events is based. A man, in other words, who shares my own enthusiasm for numbers in nature.
Given that the good professor’s field of work involves concepts I already understand perfectly, there appears to be little need for any further online trawling. I suppose I could try to discover what Will’s connection to him might have been (I’m assuming he was either a student of his or perhaps a family friend) but it doesn’t really seem to matter much. If there was ever a need to know anything about Will, that need has now gone. It went when Will went. This phase of his existence is mine to live now. And besides, I’m finding there’s just too much else vying for my attention inside the carriage. I shove the invitation down the side of my seat, to be forgotten.
Most of my fellow travellers are suited up like me (I’m wearing Will’s black two-piece, by the way, with a black silk tie, crisp white shirt and a grey overcoat). But as well as us business types, there are a good number of tourists in the mix too. The large, noisy family of Thais sitting across the aisle from me I find particularly interesting. And apparently the feeling is mutual, at least as far as the head patriarch is concerned. He has been unabashedly staring at me from within his creased and shrunken face for some time now.
Finally he decides to ask me a question, in Thai. Wily old bugger can see that I’m taking it all in (unsurprisingly, I’m quite the linguist), he just needs to check. What he asks me is whether I think his granddaughter is old enough to be married. This is what they have been discussing, in between making openly rude and offensive remarks about a couple of the other passengers. One in particular, a Brit with pursed lips and ruddy cheeks, who has been the subject of much speculation – is he headed for Bangkok, same as them? Another filthy pig for the whores, no doubt. When will the King sort it all out? That sort of thing.
But all of them are now looking at me in expectant silence, wondering if it could really be possible that a white-skinned office drone such as myself can have understood anything of their conversation. I fire back with a short reply, being careful to mirror their speech – they are southerners so they speak a language that I think of as Dambro, as opposed to formal Thai. I’ve heard it a great deal in Bangkok, where I’ve often had cause to look over the years, as you can imagine. Although, interestingly, it’s not always straightforward putting the knowledge into practice – a few times, for example, I tried to make Jesus speak in Greek but his palate was resistant to it and it just ended up making him sound ridiculous. But Will is adapting well to the oriental sounds – he has the right shaped jaw for it.
I say, ‘You should be more careful what you say in public. You never know who might be listening.’
One of their party, a girl of about Will’s age – the granddaughter in question – actually yips with surprise when she hears me speak her language. The old guy loves it, though. He falls about laughing, saying I knew it! I knew it! At this point, most people in the carriage have a quick look to see what’s going on, including the possible sex tourist, whose eyes I meet for a fraction of a second. It’s enough to know that they had been right about him. I tell them as much, referring to him with the country phrase they had used – literally, ‘farm pig’, which I rather like, mostly because of its suggestion that there is another, fancier kind of pig. Anyway, we all have a good laugh about it.
As I’m laughing, Will’s phone starts to ring in my jacket pocket, except that I don’t realise right away that it’s his phone (he has it set to vibrate, rather than actual ringing) and so there are an alarming couple of seconds when I think I might be having some kind of convulsion. It’s an odd sensation, that buzzing, if you’re not used to it (and odder still if you’re still acclimatising to the ticks and twinges of a body – no two are the same – there are always little surprises tucked away).
It’s Will’s mum. She calls quite often, if the last few weeks are anything to go by, but the conversations never seem to last long. So I answer it.
I don’t hear the first few words of what she says because the driver chooses this moment to make his announcement that we are approaching Gatwick Airport. I get up from my seat and start walking up the carriage (much to the disappointment of the Thais, who’ve still not had the explanation they deserve).
‘Where are you?’ is what she’s now saying.
‘I’m on a train.’
‘Did he say Gatwick? Are you going to the airport? Billy, are you sure that’s such a good idea?’
Bit of an odd question. And Billy? Really?
‘It’s a pretty good idea if you’re going to get a plane, Mum.’ I’d wanted that to sound light-hearted, not peevish and wearily sarcastic, which is how it came across.
‘Dr Bund’ – Bun? Bunt? Bundt? It’s hard to catch the sound of it exactly – ‘told your father and me that it wasn’t a good idea for you to travel on your own at the moment.’
She sounds really worried, like I should be saying something to calm her down. But I’m more interested in finding out about this doctor.
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br /> ‘Dr Bund said that?’
‘Dr Bundt,’ she corrects me. Who knows what she’s saying? ‘When we all saw him together, when you were at home last time. Darling, you remember.’ She says it like please say you remember. She then lowers her voice, ‘After the incident,’ she intones that word like it’s some embarrassingly exotic practice she’d rather not have to refer to, ‘at Rebecca’s house. When you got yourself in a bit of a pickle,’ she all but whispers.
A pickle? I thought episode was good, but pickle …
‘And anyway, where are you going in the middle of the week? Why aren’t you at work? I thought you said you were coming to help your father decorate the church for harvest festival this weekend.’
Wait. What?
‘What?’
‘You said you would help Dad with the church decorations.’
Will’s dad is a priest?
Ah. I think I might have said that out loud. In fact, I know I did because she has now started to cry, very quietly, like people do at funerals.
‘I was joking, Mum.’ But that sounds feeble, even to me.
‘Oh Billy.’
I really wish she’d stop calling me that.
‘Listen, I’m only going away for the day. Just over to Jersey,’ I divulge stupidly, ‘for work,’ I add, even more stupidly.
But then, actually, is it really that stupid? I can’t imagine Will’s colleagues are going to be tracking down his mum and pumping her for info. Also, it seems to settle her down a bit. She stops crying anyway.
‘You’re there with people from work?’ she asks hopefully.
