by Jonathan Coe
There was another pause, longer and more difficult than the first. I thought out my next move carefully before making it: a pensive, nonchalant stroll across to the other side of the room, and then a casual lowering of my buttocks on to the edge of the dining table, so that I was leaning back slightly as I faced her. At which point I said: ‘Do you think you could see your way clear to repeating that, by any chance?’
She regarded me intently for a few seconds. ‘I hope you don’t mind me asking this, Michael,’ she said, ‘but are you feeling all right?’
It was a fair question, by anybody’s standards: but I didn’t have it in me to give an honest answer.
‘It’s my powers of concentration,’ I said. ‘They’re not what they used to be. Too much television, I expect. If you could just … one more time … I’m listening this time. Really, I am.’
It was touch and go for a while. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if she had simply got up and left the room. She looked at her sheet of A4 paper and seemed to be wondering whether to drop the subject altogether, to jack in the clearly thankless task of trying to get me to listen to a few simple words of English. But then, after taking a deep breath, she started speaking again: slow, loud, deliberate. It was obvious that this was my last chance.
And I would have listened at this point, I really would, for my curiosity was aroused, apart from anything else, but my brain was spinning, all my senses were in a whirl, because she had used my name, she had actually called me by my first name, Michael, she had said, ‘I hope you don’t mind me asking this, Michael,’ and I can’t tell you how long it was since anybody had called me by my name, it can’t have happened since my mother came down – two, maybe three years – and the funny thing about it was that if she knew my name, then in all probability I knew hers, or I had known it once, or I was expected to know it, we must have been introduced at one time or another, and I was so busy trying to put a name to her face, and to put her face into a context where I may have seen it before, that I completely forgot to pay any attention to her slow, loud, deliberate speech, so that as soon as she finished I knew we were in for something more, something much more and something much much worse than just another long and difficult pause.
‘You haven’t been listening to a word of this, have you?’
I shook my head.
‘I get the sense,’ she said, rising quickly to her feet, ‘that I’m wasting my time here.’
She stared at me accusingly; and not having much to lose any more, I stared back.
‘Can I ask you something?’
She shrugged. ‘Why not?’
‘Who are you?’
Her eyes widened, and it felt as though she had taken a step away from me, although as far as I could see she didn’t actually move.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘I don’t know who you are.’
She gave a mirthless, incredulous smile.
‘I’m Fiona.’
‘Fiona.’ The name dropped into my mind with a heavy thud: there were no echoes. ‘Should I know you?’
‘I’m your neighbour,’ said Fiona. ‘I live just across the hall from you. I introduced myself to you just a few weeks ago. We pass on the stairs … three or four times a week. You say hello.’
I blinked, and came a little closer, gazing rudely into her face. I steeled myself to make an enormous effort of memory. Fiona … I still couldn’t remember having heard the name, not recently, and if it seemed that something about her was starting to take on a distant familiarity, the origins of this feeling were obscure, and tasted less of day-to-day encounters on the staircase than the sensation, perhaps, of being presented with a photograph of a long-dead ancestor, in whose sepia features it might just be possible to detect the ghost of a family resemblance. Fiona …
‘When you introduced yourself to me,’ I asked, ‘did I say anything?’
‘Not much, no. I thought you were rather unfriendly. But then I don’t tend to give up very easily: so I’ve kept trying.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, and sat down in an armchair. ‘Thank you.’
Fiona was left standing by the door. ‘I’ll go then, shall I?’
‘No – please – if you could just bear with me a little longer. We might get somewhere. Please, sit down.’
Fiona hesitated, and before coming to sit down on the sofa opposite me, she opened the door to the landing outside and left it ajar. I pretended not to have noticed this. She perched on the edge of the sofa, her back arched and her hands folded unhappily in her lap.
‘What were you saying just now?’ I asked.
‘You want me to go through all that again?’
‘Just briefly. In a couple of words.’
‘I was asking you to sponsor me. I’m doing a sponsored bike ride, for the hospital.’ She passed me the sheet of A4 paper, roughly half of which was covered with signatures.
A few lines at the top of the paper explained the nature of the event, and what the money was being raised for. I read them quickly and said, ‘Forty miles sounds an awful long way. You must be very fit.’
‘Well, I’ve never done anything quite like this before. I thought it would get me out and about.’
I folded the paper in two, laid it aside and thought for a moment. I could feel a new energy rising in me and the temptation to laugh, odd though it would have seemed, was quite powerful. ‘Do you know what the funny thing is?’ I said. ‘Shall I tell you the really funny thing?’
‘Please do.’
‘This is the longest conversation I’ve had – the most I’ve talked to someone – for something like two years. More than two years, I think. The longest.’
Fiona laughed in disbelief. ‘But we’ve barely spoken.’
‘None the less.’
She laughed again. ‘But that’s ridiculous. Have you been on a desert island or something?’
‘No. I’ve been right here.’
A confused shake of the head. ‘Well how come?’
‘I don’t know: I just didn’t want to. It hasn’t been a conscious decision or anything, it’s just that the occasion’s never arisen. It’s easy, you’d be surprised. I suppose in the old days you’d have to have talked to someone: going into shops and things. But now you can do all your shopping in the supermarket, and you can do all your banking by machine, and that’s about it.’
A thought occurred to me, and I got up to lift the receiver on the telephone. It was still connected.
‘Does my voice sound strange to you? How does it sound?’
‘It sounds fine. Quite normal.’
‘What about this flat? Does it smell?’
‘It’s a bit … close, yes.’
I picked up the remote control for the television and was about to switch off. The young boy with the locked, expressionless eyes, his back as tense and rigid as Fiona’s when she had sat down on my sofa, was no longer on the screen: but the avuncular man with the big grin and the heavy black moustache was still stomping around, this time in full military uniform and surrounded by men of the same age and nationality and bearing. I watched him for a few seconds and felt another memory beginning to recover its shape.
‘I know who that is,’ I said, pointing and clicking my finger. ‘It’s – whatsisname – President of Iraq …’
‘Michael, everyone knows who that is. It’s Saddam Hussein.’
‘That’s right. Saddam.’ Then, before turning the television off, I asked: ‘Who was that boy with him? The one he was trying to put his arms around?’
‘Haven’t you been watching the news? That was one of the hostages. He’s been parading them on television, as if they were cattle or something.’
This made little sense to me, but I could tell it was not the moment for elaborate explanations. I switched the television off and said – listening with interest to my own voice – ‘I’m sorry, you must think I’m being very rude. Would you like a drink? I’ve got wine and orange juice and beer and lemonade, and even a bit of w
hisky, I think.’
Fiona hesitated.
‘We can leave the door open if you like. I don’t mind about that at all.’
And then she smiled, and sat back on the sofa, and crossed her legs, saying, ‘Well, why not. That would be very nice.’
‘Wine?’
‘I think orange juice, please. I can’t seem to shake off this dreadful sore throat.’
∗
My little kitchen had always been the cleanest room in the flat. I never dusted or used a vacuum cleaner because dust is not easily visible to the casual observer, it’s possible to turn a blind eye to it, yet I could not tolerate the sight of smudges and splashes of dried food caked to my brilliant white surfaces. When I withdrew into the kitchen, therefore, and turned on the two 100-watt spotlights which sent their beams of pure brightness fearlessly exploring every gleaming angle and corner, it restored my self-confidence. The night was slowly darkening, and from the kitchen sink the first thing I could see was my own reflected face, hovering like a spectre outside my fifth-floor window. This was the face that Fiona had been addressing for the last few minutes. I took a good look at it and tried to imagine how it would have appeared to her. The eyes were puffy from lack of sleep and bloodshot from too much glassy staring at the television screen; deeply scored lines were beginning to appear around the corners of the mouth, although these were partially obscured by two days’ worth of stubble; the jaw-line was still reasonably firm, but another three or four years would probably see the onset of a double chin; the hair, once tawny, was now streaked with grey and stood desperately in need of cutting and re-styling; there were the shreds of a parting, so tentative and wasted that the onlooker might easily have been forgiven for not noticing that it was there at all. It wasn’t a friendly face: the eyes, a deep, velvety blue, might once have suggested wells of possibility but now seemed guarded, fenced off. But at the same time it was honest. It was a face you could trust.
And if you looked beyond the face, what did you see? I peered out into the twilight. Nothing much. A few scattered lights had been turned on across the courtyard, and the gentle babble of televisions and stereo systems drifted over from open windows. It was a muggy August evening, entirely typical of a summer which seemed to be taking a malicious pleasure in testing Londoners to the limit, drenching them day and night in dense city heat. Looking down, I noticed the movement of a shadow in the gardens. Two shadows, one very small. An old woman walking her dog, probably struggling to keep up as it zig-zagged from bush to bush, its nerves stretched and tingling with the excitement of secret, nocturnal pleasures. I listened to its intermittent rustles and scuffles, the only distinct sounds to be made out, apart from the occasional siren, above London’s buried monotonous hum.
Turning away from the window, I fetched a carton of orange juice from the fridge and cracked three or four ice cubes into a tumbler. I poured the juice over the blocks of ice, enjoying their dull music as they clinked together and rose to the top of the glass. Then I poured myself a glass of beer and took the drinks into the sitting room.
As I paused on the threshold, I tried to look at the room with the same objectivity I had brought to the reflection of my own face: wanting to imagine the impression it would have made on Fiona. She was watching me, now, so I didn’t have as much time, but some quick observations presented themselves: the fact that the curtains, which had come with the flat, and the pictures, which had been bought many years ago, reflected nothing of my present taste; the fact that so many of the surfaces – the table, the window-sills, the top of the television, the mantelpiece – were stacked with papers and magazines and videotapes rather than the few well-chosen ornaments which might have given the room form and personality; the fact that the bookshelves, which I had put up myself, also many years ago, had been largely cleared of books (now jumbled into a tower of cardboard boxes in the spare bedroom) and were scattered, instead, with still more videotapes, piled both horizontally and vertically, some pre-recorded and some filled with scraps of films and programmes taped off the television. It was a room, I thought, which presented an aspect not dissimilar to the face reflected in the kitchen window: it had the potential to be welcoming but for the moment seemed to have transformed itself, through a mixture of carelessness and disuse, into something ungainly and almost eerily neutral.
The first thing Fiona said about the flat, after we had been talking a little while, was that she felt it needed some pot plants. She sang the praises of cyclamen and hibiscus. She waxed lyrical about the merits of cineraria and asparagus fern. She had gone crazy on cineraria recently, she said. It would never have occurred to me to buy myself a pot plant and I tried to imagine what it would be like to share this room with a living, growing organism as well as my stale litter of films and magazines. I poured myself another beer and fetched her some more orange juice and this time she asked me to put some vodka in it. I could tell she was a warm and friendly woman because when I came to sit next to her on the sofa in order to fill out her sponsorship form, she was quite happy to let our legs come into occasional contact: there was no shrinking away, and as I wrote down the amount and signed my name I could feel our thighs touching, and I wondered how this had happened, if in fact it was Fiona who had edged closer to me. And soon it became clear that she was in no great hurry to leave, that she was for some reason enjoying talking to me – I who had so little to give in return – and I could only conclude from this that she must in some brave, quiet, reckless way have been a little desperate for companionship, because although I was a poor companion that evening, and although my behaviour must certainly have frightened her to start with, still she persisted, and grew more and more relaxed, and more and more talkative. I can’t remember how long she stayed, or what it was we talked about, but I can remember enjoying it, at first, this unaccustomed business of talking, and it must have been quite a while, several drinks later, before I began to feel tired again and uneasy. I don’t know why this should have happened, because I was still enjoying myself, but I had this sudden and intense craving to be on my own. Fiona carried on talking, I may even have been answering back, but my attention had started to wander and she only regained it by saying something which surprised me very much.
‘You can’t switch me off,’ she said.
‘Pardon?’
‘You can’t switch me off.’
She nodded at my hands. I had gone back to the armchair opposite her and without realizing it I had picked up the remote control for the video. It was pointed in her direction and my finger had strayed to the pause button.
‘I think I’d better go,’ she said, and stood up.
As she made for the door, sponsorship form in hand, I made a sudden bid to save the situation by blurting out: ‘I think I’ll get myself one of those plants. It’ll make quite a difference.’
She turned. ‘There’s a little nursery on my way home from work,’ she said softly. ‘I’ll get one for you if you like. I’ll bring it round tomorrow.’
‘Thanks. That’s very kind.’
And then she was gone. For a few seconds after the door had closed behind her I experienced a peculiar sensation: a feeling of loneliness. But this loneliness was mingled with relief and before long the relief had taken over, swamping me and calming me and guiding me gently back to the armchair and to my two friends, my trusted companions, the remote control units for the television and the video, resting one on each arm. I switched the machines on and pressed play, and Kenneth said:
‘Well, a – a handsome face isn’t everything, you know.’
∗
I woke up the next morning with a sense that something subtly momentous had happened. The event, whatever it was, would clearly not bear analysis at this stage, but in the meantime I was anxious to take advantage of its most immediate symptom, which was a surge of mental and physical energy unprecedented in my recent experience. A handful of disagreeable tasks had been gathered, cloudy and lowering, on my mental horizon for some months now, but
today it felt as though their weight had been lifted and they lay before me, unthreatening, inviting even, like a set of stepping stones which would lead me to a brighter future. I wasted no time lying around in bed. I got up and showered, made myself some breakfast, washed up and then began to hoover the whole of the flat. After that I went round with a duster, creaming off layers of dust so thick that I had to shake the cloth out of the window with every wipe. Then, tiring a little, I did a bit of desultory tidying and re-organizing. I was anxious, among other to make sure that certain papers were still to be found where I had left them many months ago, because I intended to re-acquaint myself with these and to start work on them again in the afternoon. They turned up after a search of perhaps thirty minutes, and I dropped them in a single pile on my freshly cleared desk.
This was without doubt an extraordinary day and to prove it I now did yet another extraordinary thing. I went for a walk.
My flat was at the rear of a large mansion block which fronted on to Battersea Park. Although this had been one of my main reasons for buying it, some seven or eight years ago, I rarely took advantage of the location. Circumstances sometimes obliged me to walk through the park, it’s true, but this was not the same as choosing to do so for the purposes of pleasure or meditation, and I would take absolutely no notice of my surroundings on these occasions. As it happens, I hadn’t intended to take much notice of them today, either, because when I set out on my walk I did so primarily in the hope that it would enable me to reach a certain decision, the taking of which, like so much else in my life, I had now been deferring for far too long. But it seemed that in my newly wakened state I was also less than usually capable of ignoring the world around me, and I found that I was beginning to warm to this park, which had never before struck me as being one of London’s most attractive. The grass was parched, the flowerbeds cracked and grey in the sun, but none the less their colours astounded me. It felt as though I were seeing them for the first time. Beneath a sky of impossibly pale blue, hordes of lunchtime sunbathers were surrendering themselves to the glare; occasional bits of clothing in garish primary colours shielded their pinkening bodies, while their heads throbbed to the beat of the sun and the deadening pulse of their ghetto-blasters and personal stereos. (There was a confusion of different musics.) The bins were overflowing with bottles, cans and the discarded wrappings of pre-packed sandwiches. The mood seemed to be one of festivity, with just a distant hint of tension and resentment – perhaps because the heat verged, as usual, on the unbearable, or simply because we all knew in our hearts that this was not the best place to be trying to enjoy it. I wondered how many other people were wishing that they could have been in the countryside; the real countryside, of which this park was in fact little more than a scurrilous parody. In the north-western corner, not far from the river, there was an attempt at a walled garden, and as I sat there for a few minutes it reminded me of the garden at the back of Mr Nuttall’s farm, where I used to play with Joan. But here, instead of that enchanted silence which we had taken so much for granted, I heard the rattling of lorries and the thunder of passing aeroplanes, and there were no sparrows or starlings to watch us from the trees, just strutting city pigeons and fat black rooks the size of small chickens.
