The kitchen door slams closed behind her and Amanda leans heavily against the white washed brick of the courtyard wall. It’s already gone ten o’clock but the concrete is still damp with dew. The café is full of the breakfast bunch: today mostly broad-shouldered railway workers in their luminous orange trousers and muddy black boots. They trail dirt across the linoleum tiles and sling their thick arms over the backs of the chairs, fingers poised to brush against her thigh. There is a smear of egg on the back of her hand and so she wipes it across her apron before reaching into her pocket for a cigarette. The craving for nicotine doesn’t usually come this early in the morning. She strikes a match and inhales deeply, thinking again of the man at the window table, who looks so like her father. His silk grey hair, the long thin, washed-white fingers of a pathologist.
The good-daughter would have gone to University. The ideal-daughter would have gone to Medical School. And the perfect-princess of a daughter would have eventually followed him into the morgue to be a doctor’s doctor; diagnosing the dead. Amanda told him about the café right on the edge of the park where they pay £4 an hour and throw the meals in for free. She said she was sick of being around ‘precious’ people, whining the word so that it sounded like an un-oiled door. She hoped that he might be able to picture her here standing against the back wall in her short skirt with her hair slicked back in a greasy ponytail, smoking a filter less cigarette, and that this might be enough for him to say, “You’re right Amanda, you’re not my daughter” and “I do not love you”. But as usual, he had said nothing. And nothing since.
The window next to her head creaks open, “Amanda,” says Bob, “whatcha doin’ out ‘ere?”
“I’m just having a quick fag, be there in a minute.”
“Little Miss Poshpants to smart to smoke in the kitchen like the rest of us then?” The chef chuckles his raspy laugh and ducks his head back in the window.
Amanda rubs the cigarette under the heel of her shoe and swings open the kitchen door. Bob is slouched on a stool, one elbow resting on the edge of the cooker. A frying pan spits on a ring of blue gas. There’s a spatula lying in the film of bubbling grease. Above the cooker are the shelves of condiments that Bob reaches for in his moments of inspiration – salt, a box of ground pepper and an economy sized bottle of brown sauce, it’s lid long gone. There’s a bottle of pickled eggs, floating like eyeballs in their embalming fluid. Amanda opens the refrigerator and takes out the beef sausage curled in its bowl, pokes at the translucent blue skin, sniffs the meat and then replaces it.
The railway men are working on the tracks that run across the other side of the park. They came in first thing this morning puffing and slapping their hands together, going off with steaming tea in polystyrene cups. Amanda’s had to tell Bob to order more sugar sachets. And now they’re all back for their breakfast, full English with two sausages and black pudding mostly.
“Is everything OK, mate?” asks Amanda tentatively, standing a little bit further away from the table than she usually would. The man who looks like her father is staring down at his steak. He has his elbows on the table and his head is resting on his hands. The knife and fork are untouched alongside one another on the paper napkin which Amanda has folded neatly in half. She likes these little details; it’s what makes this a job to her - taking pride, setting standards for herself. Those that use the napkins, and there are not many, leave them in scrunched balls on the table or drop them onto their plates where they discolour with mushroom juice. She sat him here specifically because he is alone. Who better to enjoy the view than someone with no one to talk to? Condensation has bloomed on the windows. Amanda has never noticed before that the blue and gold lettering across the top of the window: “PARK TIME Café” reads “EMIT KRAP” from inside. There’s an initial silence and then he mumbles something without looking up.
“What’s that?” she says, stepping a little closer.
“I said,” says the man, slowly and still quiet quietly, “I didn’t want this.”
He doesn’t lift his head but rubs at his temples and then across his forehead with the tips of his fingers. The steak has begun to bleed across the plate and into the chips.
She steps back from the table and apologising. Her hand is in her apron pocket feeling for her notebook. The mans says a tiny bit louder, “I didn’t want this.” It’s just enough for her to catch the knot of anger in his voice. He puts both hands down on either side of the plate, fingertips pressing against the red linoleum surface, his nails flush pink with the pressure. He says it again “I didn’t want this”.
“It’s a steak, medium rare, with egg and chips. Just like you ordered.”
He still doesn’t look at her.
“I’m sorry Sir,” says Amanda, “But is there something wrong with the food?” Would you like to order something else?”
He clenches his hands into small neat fists and Amanda knows, because her father has told her, that each one is the size of his heart.
“I mean life,” says the man, still stooped across the table, turning his face to look up at her. His eyes are sky blue, peppered with yellow and raw red around the edges. He looks as if he has not slept. There’s one wild, curled grey hair protruding from his eyebrow.
“I mean: I never wanted life to be like this” says the man.
Amanda clears her throat and in what she recognises to be an artificially lilting voice says: “Would you like a nice cup of tea?”
He lifts his hands slightly off the table and without taking his eyes off her, bangs them stiffly back down. The salt cellar sways briefly and then topples over, losing it’s scuffed silver cap which rolls across the tabletop and clunks on the to the floor. Salt and rice grains like fingernail clippings, leak onto the table.
“You’re not listening to me,” he says, but now the whole café is listening. Conversation around the small sunny room has stopped. There’s a screech of chair leg as one of the four men near the door, shifts to get a better view. Joe, over near the corner window, has paused, his steaming mug of tea inches from his face. Even the foreman has looked up from his book. The plastic curtain strips flap and Bob emerges from the kitchen. The man lifts his hands again and Amanda shifts her weight from one foot to the other. He turns them palm up, fingers slightly curled. His forearms start to shake and the eggs quiver on the plate. “Oh god, oh god, oh god” he says, increasing in intensity, building volume, like a siren. And then the hands go up over his face and he sucks in deep breaths through his fingers, shoulders shaking. He’s sobbing now, but quietly, whispering over and over again “Why don’t you understand me?”
Amanda bends down onto her haunches next to the man, balancing herself with one finger, setting the notebook on the table. From across the room Joe calls out:
“Amanda. That guy giving you trouble?”
She shakes her head gently and reaches out towards the man’s slumped back. He is wearing a blue fleece and beneath it a t-shirt that has ridden up at the back to reveal a strip of white flesh above his trousers. She pats the table gently instead.
“I’ll come back a bit later shall I? Would you like a glass of water?”
Nothing.
Amanda goes over to Joe and his friend and reaches out to begin to clear their table. Joe takes hold of her wrist with his huge hairy hand, she can feel the gold of the thick ring on his index finger, warmed by the tea.
“Darlin that guy ain’t givin you no trouble is he?” Amanda shakes her head and smiles. She picks up the yellowed plates and stacks them then returns with a cloth and wipes the splashes of tea and a blob of tomato sauce from the table. These tables do not wipe clean; the grease just spreads around. Amanda teases Bob that they were once white and it’s drips of tomato sauce oozed from the ends of bacon butties and sausage sandwiches that have turned them red.
Amanda walks through the plastic strips curtain into the kitchen. Bob is back on his stool, a cigarette dangling from one corner of his mouth, the door to the courtyard is open and there’s a strong smell of burning. She crinkles up her nose and waves her hand in front of her face. Bob gestures at the toaster, out of which two charred pieces of toast are protruding, “Got distracted by all that lot.” She picks them up and tosses them into the lidless plastic dustbin near the cooker.
“Where’s Pedro?”
Bob shrugs. “It’s Saturday Amanda.” He mimics the gangsta hand gesture Pedro greets them with, “Ee’s in ‘is bed, wita bleedi’ ‘ead.” The stool creaks as he rocks back and forward with laughter.
“Well it’s sure as hell not going to be me washing these dishes.” She stacks the plates on the pile, not bothering to scrape them. Drops the cutlery into the long cold water in the sink.
There is only one glass left at the very back of the shelf and it’s been standing upside down so the base is covered in that sticky kind of dust you only get in kitchens. She rinses it under the running tap, squeezes in a gloop of fairy liquid and watches it run down the side of the glass. One of the railway workers peers through the plastic flaps.
“Looking for the bog?”
Bob gestures him out through the backdoor. He crosses the courtyard and swings open the blue toilet door. He has to stoop to get in.
She scrubs and rinses out the glass and then begins to fills it for the man who looks like her father. The cold water runs up over the brim of the glass, over her fingers and splashes into the sink.
Amanda remembers the low roofed shed at the end of her father’s garden and him stooping in and out to get his tools. It was the third week in September and he was digging out potatoes so she took him a glass of water. But she had forgotten the three blocks of ice he liked and so he sent her back for another. He slipped his baby finger under the base so that it wouldn’t slip through the knobbled material of his gloves and took a long sip.
“You could clean these for me,” he said gesturing with his free hand at the pile of potatoes.
Amanda fetched a bucket, a scrubbing brush and the hosepipe running at a trickle, upended the wheelbarrow and sat on top of it. He pressed the fork down into the soil, set a boot on top of the tines and then leant his weight onto it, bent the earth up in an arc. It made a tearing sound and the potatoes rose like moles. Potatoes are ready when the leaves of the plant begin to curl and die; these had been left too long. There was barely enough stem left to tell where to dig and yet with each incision another resistant potato was extracted.
“Sometimes,” grinned Amanda’s father, “You have to dig a little deeper.” He rubbed the potato up and down against his thigh and then threw it to her. It was as cold and heavy as a stone. He leant on the handle of fork with one bent arm.
“So what’s your favourite subject at school?”
Amanda wiped the back of her hand across her face.
“Have you been thinking about what you’re going to do next summer?” He peered at the sole of his boot, scraped it against the head of the fork. “You have to start making some decisions Amanda, don’t let your brains go to waste.” He began to dig again, picking at the surface of the soil looking for the base of stem and then clearing clods of earth before setting to work.
“I wanted to be a GP you know? That’s why I went to Medical School in the first place. But when we started doing rounds on the wards I realised it was never going to happen. I can’t get people to tell me what I need to know.” He grunted, leaning his full weight on the fork, “It’s so much easier to go in and have a look for myself!” He laughed.
“Do you know that’s actually what autopsy means? To see for oneself.” He picked up the glass and drank the rest of the water, crunching the ice blocks between his teeth. “Unlike the living, when the dead speak they can’t hide a thing.”
Amanda turned the potato over in her hands. It was all brown except for a smear of reddish mud on the white flesh where the fork had pierced the skin.
“There’s still lots of time to decide,” said Amanda.
He gestured at the potato she was holding ready to drop into the bucket, “That one’s not done yet,” and turned back to the fork.
“You don’t even know what subjects I’m doing.”
“Of course I do.”
“Ok, name one. Name one A level I’m taking this year.”
“Biology?”
“No.”
“Chemistry?”
“No.”
“Well how are you going to get anywhere without biology or chemistry?”
She threw the potato at the bucket and missed. It skipped across the furrows of the patch and rolled a half circle on itself before coming to a standstill.
“Why do you suddenly care anyway? I chose my subjects two years ago.”
“It was you who started on about the subjects.”
He stabbed the fork into the earth, picked up the potato she’d thrown and dropped it into the bucket.
“I was just trying to show an interest.”
“If I don’t tell you are you going to cut me open to see for yourself? You’re so good with sharp objects: knives, forks, words.” She stood up, “Well I’m not fucking dead yet in case you haven’t noticed.”
And she saw it in his face just for a moment that look of surprise you see when someone is shot in a film; the widening eyes. They know what’s happened, even thought it doesn’t hurt yet.
She put her hands in her pockets and walked past him and when they were shoulder to shoulder facing in opposite directions said, “I don’t want to come here anymore.” The wooden gate shuddered against its frame behind her and she marched out along the back of the hedges. Before she even reached the field she heard the hollow thump of another potato hitting the side of the bucket.
When she returned to the house the barrow, the bucket, and the fork were all gone. Her mother was waiting for her in the kitchen.
She lifts the glass and takes a long drink of water. Tips it out and then washes it again. Re-fills it, adds three blocks of ice from a cracked plastic tray in the freezer.
The man is sitting up a little straighter; his elbows are back on the table. He has one hand across his forehead and he’s pulled the plate a bit closer. He has the fork in his right hand and he’s prodding at the chips, moving them round on the plate. He nibbles a tiny portion off the end of a chip, lays the fork back on the plate.
Amanda puts down the glass and says quietly “I brought you some water.”
The man sniffs and wipes the back of his hand across his nose. He nods slightly without looking up.
“Can I get you anything else?” He doesn’t move and so Amanda starts to turn away.
“Wait,” says the man, “Could you sit here and have a cup of tea with me.” Amanda tucks her hands into the pocket of her apron. She hears Joe clearing his throat.
“Uh, not right now, ok? We’re a bit busy at the moment, but maybe later when these guys are back at work.” She gestures with her thumb over her shoulder at the tables of constructions workers, twists an earlobe between her thumb and forefinger. The man turns slowly, twisting further and further round at the waist, scanning the room, he takes in Joe and his mate, the four guys at the table near the door, Bob who as emerged from the kitchen with a plate of toast. He springs back to face the window like a coil.
Joe is drumming his fingers on the tabletop. Amanda offers the two of them another cup of tea. He ignores her, wipes a paper napkin across his face, lets it drop onto the floor. They’re off they say and stand up. He takes her hand and presses a balled up five-pound note into her palm, closes her fingers around it and says, “That’s for you, Amanda”. They’ve left the bill and a pile of coins on the table.
“Wot was all ‘at about?” Bob nods his head back at the restaurant, “With that bloke at the window.” He follows her to the courtyard where they both light cigarettes.
“Think he’s probably just a bit lonely or something. Wants me to sit and have a cup of tea with him.”
“Well it wouldn’t kill ya would it?”
Amanda rolls her eyes.
“Aw, come on Amanda, he seems harmless. Why don’t you just have a cup of tea with the bloke.”
“Sheez, you’re not paying me enough for this kind of customer service.”
The man is sitting up now. He has pushed his plate so far away from him its on the other side of the table, and if you didn’t know any better you’d think his friend was about to come back and eat it. He is staring out of the window. She sets the two cups of tea down beside the untouched water glass. .
“Do you take sugar?” She fishes a handful of blue sachets out of her apron pocket and slides them onto the table. She pulls out the chair, dusts the seat and sits down, puts her hands on the table and then in her lap. The man doesn’t look up. He’s stroking the handle of his fork. Amanda runs her fingernail along the aluminium edging on the table, a thread of dirt snakes out from the grove.
“Are you feeling better?”
“I’m Martin,” he says. “I’m sorry about freaking out.” He looks briefly up at Amanda and then the red-rimmed eyes go back to the fork. “I’m..” she begins, but he cuts her off.
“Yeah, I know, Amanda.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you know, there’s only one letter difference between Martin and martian. One little ‘a’. Not so much difference at all really. Martian. Martin. Martian. Martian Martin. Martin Martian. That’s me.” He pulls a paper napkin from the aluminium dispenser on the table and lays it out in front of him.
“The thing is,” said Martin, “that I’m lonely.” He flattens out the napkin and then folds it in half diagonally, drawing his thumbnail across the fold. “I just want to have some friends. But every time I try to talk to people, they get scared off. ” The two ends of the napkin are brought together and it is halved again.
Last week tried to strike up a conversation with someone on the train. He had seen the man before; they were often on the same train into work in the morning. Martin said “Good morning” and asked the man what he was reading. He had been reading the newspaper. Martin asked whether anything interesting had happened. The man said that it had not and lifted the paper up in front of his face. Martin commented on the story on the front page (hospital reforms) and began to tell the man about his experience of having been in hospital a few years previously.
“And then he got up and changed seats.” The napkin is now a folded pressed triangle, he lets it go and it springs out into a pyramid. “I hadn’t even told him about the x-rays or the food.”
Amanda imagines what her father would find inside Martin; a big empty space with rattling pips of anger that would ping against the Petri dish after he tweezed them out. He extracts another paper napkin from the dispenser, smoothes it out.
“Did you know that it’s impossible to fold any piece of paper more than seven times? Doesn’t matter what the size of the paper is. Seven times.” He counts as he folds: “One, two, three…” and then sets another pyramid beside the other.
Amanda folds and unfolds her hands under the table. She can hear Bob stacking pans in the kitchen the faint rhythm of a song from the radio he keeps on the shelf.
“It’s happened all my life. At school I was in love with a girl called Valerie. Well not ‘in love with’ but I don’t know, it was my first crush or something like that I suppose. She had this long straight blond hair that she wore in bunches, tied up at the side of her head with red plastic baubles on black elastic bands. I used to imagine being allowed to stroke those bunches, twirl them around my index finger. I bet they were as smooth as silk.”
He had made her a valentine’s card from a doily his mother had let him have. He’d cut out a pink heart and mounted the whole thing on white cardboard. There had been glitter too. Valerie hadn’t wanted to take the card but he’d pressed it on her, saying “It’s for you” until she’d opened it in front of him, a giggling friend dangling from each arm, read it. She barged past him and at the front of the class tore it into pieces over the waste paper bin.
He adds another to the collection of pyramids on the red desert tabletop.
“Did you get teased?” asks Amanda taking a sip of tea. It’s still too hot and gasps as it burns her tongue.
“For a bit, but I was too peripheral for anyone to bother about me for any length of time. Oh, I’m sure you can imagine. You would have been one of those popular girls right? I can just see you. Swinging your bag over your shoulder and leaning against the wall, making comments about the boys as they walk past.”
“Actually,” says Amanda, “I wasn’t. I didn’t really like school at all. I got teased.” She takes a napkin out of holder. “About was my father. ‘Amanda’s dad speaks for dead people.’” She tips her head from side to side and sings: “Na na, na ha, naa naa.” Laughs. “He’s a pathologist. An enthusiastic pathologist,” she laughs again. “My god, Martin, you’re right. Look at that! Seven folds. No more.”
“He offered to come and talk to our class the one year. Brought his bag of equipment. And he’s pulling the things out one by one. Like a magician you know. With this grin on his face. ‘This is the magnifying glass’,” She pulled imaginary equipment from the beneath the table, “And what have we here children? Why it’s the Stryker saw. For cutting the breast bone.” He’d gone on and on. About the dust the saw made and how if it wasn’t for autopsies one in every three deaths would be wrongly diagnosed. Someone’s mother had called in to complain.
“But the worst thing was that line, ‘I speak for dead people’. Do you remember the film? He thought he was being so current.” Amanda pauses and takes a sip of tea. Martin has stopped folding the napkins.
Martin says: “There’s definitely something strange about me you know. I don’t know what it is, but people can obviously smell it or something. Do I smell weird to you? He looks up. Amanda lets go of her mug of tea, clenches and unclenches her fists.
“Actually Martin, I was just going to say some more about that story.”
Martin pushes the pyramids into two straight rows.
“He, my father that is, was being ushered out the door, and I was sort of slouched down in my chair, half hiding, relieved it was all over, and then he suddenly remember me and stepped back into the room, looking all around. The teacher pointed at me and he waved and shouted, ‘Bye Amanda.’ He was so pleased with himself you know? So proud.”
“I don’t see what’s so bad about that?”
“The thing that’s bad about it is that he has no awareness of what’s going on around him; with people around him. He just doesn’t notice other people.” She adds her pyramid to the pile.
“He doesn’t see living people. Ha! It’s like he doesn’t try to think about what they might be thinking or feeling.”
“And you think that’s his fault?”
“Yes I do. I mean Martin you know, you say you’re lonely and no one wants to talk to you but until I told you that story, and then I had to tell you to carry on listening, you didn’t notice another person in this café.”
Amanda tears open one of the sachets of sugar and tips it into her cup.
“You walked in here and you were all like ‘poor me, come and sit with me’ and you didn’t even notice that there were other people in here or that I was busy. You’re so wrapped up in yourself that other people don’t matter to you. That’s why they’re not interested in you. Because you’re not interested in them.”
The teaspoon clinks against the side of the cup. Martin swallows.
“I’m sorry, that wasn’t really aimed at you. The anger. I don’t know you but I just, well I think it would help if you worry a bit more about other people and a little bit less about yourself.”
Martin takes the teaspoon out of his tea and sucks it. “It’s not as easy for everyone as it is for you, to work out what other people are thinking.” He sets the teaspoon down on the table. “Or needing. The world would be much simpler place if you didn’t have to dig it out of them whole time. If people just said what they meant.”
He pays his bill but doesn’t leave a tip. He says he’ll be back next Saturday and that next time he’ll pay for her tea too. “Ok,” says Amanda.
She walks home across the park as the late afternoon sun dips behind the skeletal beech trees, kicking up the yellowing leaves and thinking of a party they’d had at the old house, before her parents split up. She’d been sent to her father to tie the bright red bow on the back of her dress. He knelt down to do it, holding his breath as he threaded the ribbon through the small white eyes and pulled it tight against her ribs. She felt the pressure of his finger in the centre of the bow as he looped and knotted it.
For most of the night he stood silent as a butler at the sideboard making the drinks. People took their glasses from him and stepped away into the middle of the room or over to the window. Her mother swished from one guest to the next, bracelets jangling, laughing, her head thrown back, touching someone on the arm. When Mr McKenzie whispered in her ear, her eyebrow lifted, a hand came up to her mouth and she giggled. Her father looked down at his drink, stirred the ice with his finger.
Amanda was taken up to bed but couldn’t sleep and when she heard the back door open and close she knelt on the bed and peeked out at the garden. Her father was sitting on the bottom step, in the pool of light cast from inside, breaking twigs into smaller and smaller pieces.
The rhythmic thumping of the work on the railway drifts across the park. Every now and again there’s a flash of orange between the trees along the track. Amanda crosses her arms over her chest, rubs her shoulders and then clenches her heart-sized fists.
That conversation at the museum, how old had she been? Five? Six? There was a plastic heart with four separate sections painted in different colours and you could take them apart and hold them up against the poster to match the shape and find out which bit you were holding. Amanda held the left ventricle against her chest and said: “It must fill up almost all of me, my heart”. And her father put the piece of plastic heart in its correct place with the others, and then folded her fingers into a ball and said, “People’s hearts are only about as big as their fists. But, if you eat too many chips and you don’t do enough exercise, then you’ll get big and fat and your heart will explode from working too hard!” He grinned.
Amanda looked at the drawings and writing on the museum wall and then back to her father, “But how do you know Daddy?”
“I’m a special type of doctor honey, I look inside people to find the secret of why they died.” She imagined her father finding secrets in people like marbles scooped from the mud at the bottom of the school pond.
“Does it hurt?” asked Amanda, “Having the secrets taken out?”
“No. The people are dead. Don’t you understand me?” said her father speaking more emphatically, “The people are dead. Nothing hurts when you’re dead.”
Her mother is ironing and watching TV.
“Why did I leave your father? Well the thing was, the traditional gift for a tenth wedding anniversary is tin or aluminium, so Darling, I’m sure you’ll agree I was on a deadline to get out of there after the ninth.”
“Seriously.”
“Seriously Amanda, it’s a long story, and I’m tired.” She drapes a skirt over the back of the sofa.
“Do you know what I remember? I remember stopping at that car accident, when he got out to help. And you told me not to look. But I still did. And Dad was leaning into the car. I remember this woman’s head lolled out, just for a minute, and he caught with his palm. And then him getting back in the car and reaching out for your hand on the edge of the seat and there was blood underneath his fingernails. And I saw you, I saw you flinch, and take your hand away.”
She puts her down the iron and picks up the remote to turn down the television.
“Darling, there’s never a single simple explanation for these things. Why does anyone leave anyone? Because they don’t love them anymore?” Her fingers puff at the curls in her neck. “Because they don’t think they can live with them anymore? Because the thought of being alone is better than the thought of being together?” She walks round and flops onto sofa, cradles a cushion in her lap. “Or because you realise that you’re not really together anyway and you’re actually already alone?”
“Your father…” she trails off, weaves a tousle on the cushion between her fingers. “He, you know, he finds it hard. He’s just not good with people. He can’t talk like normal people can talk. He’s a man of extremes: either he’s not saying anything or he’s saying too much. Do you know what I mean?”
Amanda runs her hand along the fabric seat of the chair. This is where she would sit, summoned for punishment, while he filled his pipe, in the great leather chair opposite. Shoes dangling above the floor, listing her sins in her head. She had not cleaned the bath. The pipe tap, tapped against the glass ashtray. She had talked back to her mother. A matchstick scratched at the upturned bowl. Her math teacher had written “Not good enough” on her test paper. The tobacco wrapper rustled open and closed. He never lit it until he had finished speaking. It waited on the arm of the chair.
“But he also has this need to be with people. God, even people who don’t like him. He finds it so difficult to be alone. I loved your father Amanda. But he didn’t make it easy. Why are you so angry with him sweetheart?”
At the school prize giving he had taken her mother by both hands and kissed her abruptly on both cheeks, said a little too loudly “Well look at my girls.” And he was so proud of her he’d said. Hugged her too tight. He wasn’t really. He’d been hoping for three A’s and no B’s.
“Sometimes I think it’s because he wants me to be like him. And sometimes I thinks it’s because he wants me to better than him. But mostly, it’s because he wants me to be more than just me.”
“What bollocks. Of course he doesn’t. He just wants you to have the best you can. For you. He doesn’t want you to waste your life. ”
“But he just wants so much from me, you know? It’s the wanting that makes me angry.”
“And what about you, how much do you want from him? This whole café business is all about wanting him not care isn’t it? That’s a lot to ask of someone who loves you don’t you think?”
Amanda looks at the empty leather chair.
“Sometimes I think its because I’m so used to being angry with him that I don’t know how else to be.”
Her mother sets the cushion back on the sofa, stands up and smoothes her skirt.
“I’m going to throw something together for dinner, you hungry?”
“Don’t worry about me,” says Amanda, “I think I’ll see what Dad is doing.”
The Bell Tolls
“I don’t like to be late,” said Catherine Lang as the door was opened for her at 6:50pm. Kate had said 7pm and not to bring anything. Her friends called her Clang. Not unkindly of course but because of her initials C. Lang. And also, a little bit she suspected, for the way that sentences swung with the weight of her confidence, out of her mouth and struck against the conversation. Sure she was opinionated, but so were all the women in her family. Her grandmother: a local MP for many years, had campaigned vigorously around maternity issues, and her ideas shaped not one, not two, but three major legislative amendments in the course of her career. And her mother: former head of the Council of Higher Education and now steering the Education Action Group in their reformation of inner city schools.
Kate took Clang’s hound’s-tooth coat and hooked it onto the stand in the hall.
“Would you mind terribly, if I just freshen up?” asked Clang.
Kate and Andrew’s house was exactly the type of house that Clang would have herself one day. The broad wooden staircase curved and creaked up to the first floor where bedrooms peeled off from the landing. Clang’s house would have three bedrooms rather than just the two and a separate bathroom for the guests of course. She stood at the basin and washed her hands, warming them under the water, turning the bar of lavender soap over and over between her palms. Her hair had got so long! She always liked long hair; the elegance and shine of it falling over her shoulders. She pulled down her jumper, revealing just a little more cleavage, scooped her breasts up into her bra and ran a finger under her eye to catch a small dash of mascara she missed.
Andrew was in the kitchen peeling chestnuts. It was a beautiful kitchen, the windowsills dense with pots of herbs, saucepans and skillets hung from stainless steel clips against the wall and a huge antique maps filled the back wall. The pastel blinds were half drawn and the green glass tiles behind the cooker sparkled. It’s only a shame they did not have an Aga. And the shelves where Kate’s antique bottles and jam jars stood gathering dust would in Clang’s kitchen groan beneath the weight of the preserves that she would make herself – pickled lemons, apricot jam – that sort of thing.
Clang kissed Andrew on each cheek. Andrew was exactly the type of man that Clang would marry one day. Oh yes, his quick witted charm, his feisty intelligence so cheaply accentuated with those little round glasses, his muscular forearms, would be all that she required.
“Clang darling, how are you? Pour yourself a glass of wine,” he said gesturing with his elbow at the collection of glasses on the sideboard.
“There’s a burgundy and merlot open or a desperately good pinot grigio in the fridge. And before I forget your fruit basket is in the conservatory.”
Every autumn their garden dripped with fruit and no one went home without a basket of pears or apples, or cherries or last year: butternut squash, under one arm. Clang could see two woven baskets waiting on the stone floor of the conservatory. One for her, one for Sean and Amina. They sat between the antique leather chair, and the two pairs of Wellington boots, flower pot full of gardening tools, lit by the silver floor lamp, it looked like a photograph out of Country Living, rather than a terraced house in Peckham.
Kate came through from the dining room.
“Oh Clang, you don’t have any wine!”
Sean and Amina arrived some fifteen minutes later. Clang was on her second glass of wine and was talking them through a column she’d written for the newspaper. It was an enormously significant thing not all the secretaries were given this kind of chance. Clang attributed the honour to her outspoken intelligence. (here) The plan of course was to work in journalism for few years (anyone after all, could work in journalism) and then get into lobbying.
Amina had lost weight, she took off her coat and Clang sucked her teeth at the thin little arms protruding from her jumper sleeves. Sean walked her through to the kitchen his hand on her back.
Andrew and Kate had a large dining room wallpapered in retro flock design that beautifully offset the huge mirror hanging above the fireplace. Of course it wasn’t a working fireplace, but the attractive arch of the original brickwork had been elegantly exposed. The pine floorboards were stained a rich mahogany to match the dresser set against the back wall. A large glass chandelier dangled above the dining room table on which Kate had created a centrepiece of autumnal leaves that danced in the light of the candles.
“Wow,” said Amina, “This looks amazing!”
Clang ran a finger down one of the wallpaper seams where the glue hadn’t quite taken and the two edges were peeling apart.
“Did you do the papering yourself?” said Clang
As Kate laid the first course of roasted figs and parma ham before them Sean was complaining about a decision taken by the town planning council of Sefton, just the week before, to remove Antony Gormley’s collection of 100 naked cast iron men from the beach.
“It’s this type of thing that gives us town planners a bad name.”
“But they must have had a reason,” asked Clang.
“Well a few fools had to get rescued because they wandered out to see the furthest ones and got caught by the tide,” he shrugged his shoulders, “and the fisherman are all panicked they’re going to scrape the bottom of their boat-y-kins.”
“Oh I read about that,” said Andrew, “I liked the idea of the accessibility of the art. Apparently people painted their bollocks. It an interesting way of engaging with sculpture that you just don’t get in a gallery. What a shame.”
“Sure,” said Kate, slipping back into place, “but the council aren’t going to take the risk of being blamed for a fatality. Art so good it kills!”
Clang loves these types of discussions. She only ever seems to have them here at Andrew and Kate’s house with her three Uni friends. And Amina. Shaun has Amina now. Amina, who doesn’t often say very much. The argument will go round and round and she watches wide-eyed flicking her shiny black hair over her shoulder and squeezing Sean’s hand under the table. But then of course Amina works in a bank.
“Well that’s just it isn’t it?” said Sean, “Where do you draw the line between the council’s responsibility for keeping you safe and the individual’s responsibility to take care of themselves?”
Clang gave charity only where there was also an opportunity to encourage and correct. She carried in her head a small number of phrases that she deemed appropriate to inspire street sleepers away from their pavements and cardboard boxes. “This fifty pence is not going to save you, only you can do that.” If possible she liked to press the coin into the palm of a grubby hand and close the fingers over it, showing that she was not, like most people, afraid to touch them. She didn’t give to those men who walk up and down on the train apologising insincerely for ruining her journey. Because they do ruin it. With their false platitudes and their complete lack of humility. Or is it deference?
This is the kind of person that Catherine Lang is. She sees the world in black and white and carries a great deal of responsibility for keeping it just so. She follows where the women of her family have led. There have never been meagre expectations for Catherine Lang. Her family wait breathlessly in the front row for her to take the stage. She stalks about in the wings, awaiting her cue.
“I’ll tell you where the line lies,” said Clang, and she drew on the white linen tablecloth with her finger. She’d tucked her foot up under her on the chair so that she was sitting just a little higher at the table, resting on an elbow on the table, her finger curled around her chin, she leant forward and spoke.
“The council and or government’s responsibility and or organisation’s responsibility (let’s not forget about employers and health and safety now), is to provide the means for the individual to take care of themselves.” She thumped on the right of her invisible line with the side of her extended hand.
“And the responsibility of the individual,” she thumped on the left of the line, “is to utilise the means.”
Clang leant back in her chair, lifted her wine glass.
“So Sean, in your Gormley example, the responsibility of the council should be, and should never go beyond, providing the individual with the means to take care of themselves in that particular situation – we’re talking warning signs, tidal markers. That sort of thing. For the fisherman, buoys!” Clang waved her hand as she said this admiring how she had cut so deftly to heart of the matter.
“Anything more is a blatant infringement of the individual’s right to make their own decisions.”
“Sure,” said Kate, standing to clear the plates, “until someone dies because they didn’t read the sign or because they had left their reading glasses at home or because they don’t understand English.”
Clang took another sip of her wine.
The main course was marinated pork fillets roasted on rhubarb and served with roast potatoes. Each fillet had been stewed in oil, garlic and sage overnight, then hand wrapped in proscitto, and carefully cooked in greaseproof paper. Andrew had cut them diagonally and laid them across the plates, dribbled with sauce. Clang thought the roast potatoes looked a little insipid.
There were mutterings of approval from around the table. Clang had to raise her voice to return attention to the point of discussion.
“So Kate, do you mean to say, that those individuals who do take responsibility for their own lives, who actively make use of the facilities around them to protect their liberties and freedoms, should be denied those liberties and freedoms because some individuals can’t be bothered to take responsibility for themselves?”
Sean picked up his cutlery and began on the pork.
Kate sipped her wine.
“Andrew, this really is amazing!” said Sean. Amina nodded.
“No, Clang, that’s not quite what I meant. I was just trying to say that the theoretical ideal often falls down in practice. Mostly because people have what I like to term, legislative angst.” She smiled, “I agree with your principles but the reality is that councils, governments, organisations, the whole lot, are all just scared shitless of being sued. And I’ll concede, on occasion, disproportionately so.”
“But that’s just wrong,” said Clang, resting her fork on the edge of her plate, she reached for the napkin on her lap, drew it roughly across her mouth and then smoothed it back over her skirt.
“Legislation has to ensure that there is at least an onus on the individual to take care of themselves. I mean you see it all the time in employment law don’t you? You can’t just sue a company because someone is harassing you. You have to show that as an individual you’ve used the means that the company has provided to protect yourself.”
As Clang spoke, Amina, sitting on her right, set down her cutlery. Her chin dropped onto her chest and her long hair, as sleek as a black velvet curtain, hid her face so that Clang couldn’t see that she had begun to cry.
“If you’re going to sue for harassment, you can’t not have lodged a complaint, been through the tribunal, the whole thing. That’s why it works. If the individual has taken responsibility for themselves, and the company has provided them with the means to do so, then the company isn’t at fault.”
Sean reached out and took Amina’s hand. No one responded. Outside a car passed on the street. Just a bit too close to the road, thought Clang.
Kate said, “Amina?” and Andrew set down his knife and fork.
“She’s going through some stuff at work,” said Sean, lifting the curtain of Amina’s hair with one finger, stroking her cheek, “This guy she works with… Shall I tell them?”
Amina nodded but didn’t look up. Kate gestured at box of tissues on the top of the dresser and motioned for Clang to get them.
“Her boss,” said Sean, “has been saying stuff. Nothing major. Just odd little remarks that seem, you know, vaguely inappropriate. It’s hard to know whether he means anything by it.”
Amina sniffed, wiped her nose, but still didn’t look up.
“It sounds so stupid. Look, don’t stop eating,” she picked up her cutlery again.
“Last week we had this working lunch thing and we were half way through, talking about how we work together and he suddenly said ‘Oh I think there’s something else there, I really like you Amina.’”
She took a mouthful of pork, chewed, slowly, swallowed.
“It seems innocuous don’t you think? But it was the way he said it, long drawn out words. I just didn’t know what to say.”
“And then on the Sunday he sent her an email about some work and he’d signed it ‘You are brilliant and Wonderful, Love Roger’”.
“The work wasn’t that good,” said Amina, smiling.
Clang swallowed a mouthful of pork.
“Oh please, it’s so clear. He’s having a go! If you were a kid this would be grooming.”
Amina looked up. “Well no, I don’t think it is that clear really. He’s just not the type. I can’t tell whether he’s deliberately crossing boundaries,” she took a sip of wine, “Or whether he’s not even aware of them.”
“Married?” asked Kate
Amina nodded.
Clang reached for the salt, “You have to say something.”
Amina dropped her chin again, put her hands in her lap.
“But I don’t feel sure enough to say something. What if it’s just me being oversensitive you know? What if I’m wrong? Imagine how mortifying it would be if it was all a horrible misunderstanding.”
“Oh for godsakes, this is exactly what I meant earlier. The bank will have very clearly laid out policies on this type of thing. It doesn’t matter whether you’re right or wrong. It’s the equivalent of the tidal markers. Read the signs and get of the water, Amina.”
Clang set her cutlery down, and this time with both palm banged on the left hand side of her invisible line.
“Its up to you. I mean you just have to do it. Otherwise he gets away with it doesn’t he?”
Amina tugged at the napkin on her lap.
“Yes Clang, I hear you,” she said looking up, her cheeks flushed with colour “But to do anything about this kind of thing you have to be absolutely sure you’re right. One hundred percent certain ‘that’s’ what’s going on. It has to be the truth before you can speak it because by speaking it you make it real and hard and tangible and you can’t take it back. You have to believe it so much that you stop listening to anything that anyone else is telling you because if you listen to what they’re saying you might loose you conviction and stop seeing that you’re right, you’re right, you’re right.”
She stood up, her chair squeaking on the wood floor, the end of her napkin balled in one hand, “You have to say it to yourself, over and over again, standing on your soap box, ringing your bell.” She waved the napkin, “I’m right. I’m right. Clang, Clang, Clang.”
Amina dropped the napkin and turned out of the room. The CD had come to an end and over the soft hissing of the speakers, they all heard the creaking of the stairs and the click of the bathroom door closing. Sean got up and followed. Andrew sat dead still, cutlery poised on either side of his plate, mouth slightly open. He turned to look at Kate.
Clang stood up, “I’ll just get a glass of water.”
Above the kitchen sink, her reflection glared back from the black window. She looked at the dark rings beneath her eyes and the tatty ends of her hair on her shoulders, in need of a cut. Behind her at the other end of the imperfect kitchen that wasn’t hers, stood the two imperfect men, who also weren’t hers, talking in low voices. She could hear the soft patter of Amina’s small feet in the bathroom above. Sean said to Andrew, “Look I think we’ll probably head off, sorry mate, it’s been a long week you know. We’re both really tired.” The toilet flushed.
Clang walked out to face them. “No, it’s me who should go.”
She walked past them into the hall and lifted down her coat.
“I really am genuinely and completely sorry,” she said pulling her arms through the sleeves.
“Sometimes, I just don’t…” She swallowed. “I really, really never meant to upset anyone.”
“I know,” said Sean, “And so does Amina.”
“I’m a crap bell ringer huh? Missed my timing, came in too loud. Ruined the whole piece.” She smiled.
Kate came through from the dining room and she kissed her on the cheek. “I’m off to practice, darlings, and I am so dreadfully sorry.”
She swung the door closed behind her and stood for a few brief moments on the walk.
The train was packed with the Saturday night crowd of south Londoners sallying their way into town. She didn’t bother with a seat, and stood near the doors, her back against the glass partition.
Across from her was a black guy wearing jeans and white trainers, the wires of his music player disappearing up beneath his hooded top, possibly in his teens. As they drew into the next station at an elderly woman got up from her seat and brushed past Clang to get to the doors. She addressed the young man in a loud voice:
“Are you getting off?”
He took out an earphone, and cocked his head slightly towards her.
“Are you getting off?” she repeated without looking at him.
He shook his head.
“Well then get out of my way,” she burst.
There was more than enough room for her to pass him; he was leaning against the wall, she had the whole width of the doors. The train had stopped and so he reached for the ‘open’ button on her behalf. She shot out a hand and slapped his wrist out of the way. It made the hard sharp sound of whip.
Rage rose in Clang like a fire. How dare this woman? How dare she! He was clearly trying to help. He had been minding his own business. Clang took a step forward to intervene, to say something on his behalf, to strike back. But the boy took a step back into the carriage, one surprised hand still holding the earphone. His head dropped slightly and she felt the heat of his humiliation. How much worse would it be rescued by a young white woman?
But she felt she must say something, something to encourage the boy, to restore his sense of self worth. Something to remind him that not all white women are like that. That we live in a country, and in particular, a city, where do not, and will not tolerate such behaviour. The thing that Clang would say was: “Don’t worry mat, she’ll get what’s coming to her.” And she would say it when no one else could hear. It would be just what the boy needed to make him feel better.
As they stepped off the train he walked quickly towards the ticket barriers as if he was fleeing. She strode to catch up and was about to reach for his arm when she realised that he was humming; a soft but distinct melody. He lifted a hand, snapped his fingers, smiled.
Clang fell back.
Kate took Clang’s hound’s-tooth coat and hooked it onto the stand in the hall.
“Would you mind terribly, if I just freshen up?” asked Clang.
Kate and Andrew’s house was exactly the type of house that Clang would have herself one day. The broad wooden staircase curved and creaked up to the first floor where bedrooms peeled off from the landing. Clang’s house would have three bedrooms rather than just the two and a separate bathroom for the guests of course. She stood at the basin and washed her hands, warming them under the water, turning the bar of lavender soap over and over between her palms. Her hair had got so long! She always liked long hair; the elegance and shine of it falling over her shoulders. She pulled down her jumper, revealing just a little more cleavage, scooped her breasts up into her bra and ran a finger under her eye to catch a small dash of mascara she missed.
Andrew was in the kitchen peeling chestnuts. It was a beautiful kitchen, the windowsills dense with pots of herbs, saucepans and skillets hung from stainless steel clips against the wall and a huge antique maps filled the back wall. The pastel blinds were half drawn and the green glass tiles behind the cooker sparkled. It’s only a shame they did not have an Aga. And the shelves where Kate’s antique bottles and jam jars stood gathering dust would in Clang’s kitchen groan beneath the weight of the preserves that she would make herself – pickled lemons, apricot jam – that sort of thing.
Clang kissed Andrew on each cheek. Andrew was exactly the type of man that Clang would marry one day. Oh yes, his quick witted charm, his feisty intelligence so cheaply accentuated with those little round glasses, his muscular forearms, would be all that she required.
“Clang darling, how are you? Pour yourself a glass of wine,” he said gesturing with his elbow at the collection of glasses on the sideboard.
“There’s a burgundy and merlot open or a desperately good pinot grigio in the fridge. And before I forget your fruit basket is in the conservatory.”
Every autumn their garden dripped with fruit and no one went home without a basket of pears or apples, or cherries or last year: butternut squash, under one arm. Clang could see two woven baskets waiting on the stone floor of the conservatory. One for her, one for Sean and Amina. They sat between the antique leather chair, and the two pairs of Wellington boots, flower pot full of gardening tools, lit by the silver floor lamp, it looked like a photograph out of Country Living, rather than a terraced house in Peckham.
Kate came through from the dining room.
“Oh Clang, you don’t have any wine!”
Sean and Amina arrived some fifteen minutes later. Clang was on her second glass of wine and was talking them through a column she’d written for the newspaper. It was an enormously significant thing not all the secretaries were given this kind of chance. Clang attributed the honour to her outspoken intelligence. (here) The plan of course was to work in journalism for few years (anyone after all, could work in journalism) and then get into lobbying.
Amina had lost weight, she took off her coat and Clang sucked her teeth at the thin little arms protruding from her jumper sleeves. Sean walked her through to the kitchen his hand on her back.
Andrew and Kate had a large dining room wallpapered in retro flock design that beautifully offset the huge mirror hanging above the fireplace. Of course it wasn’t a working fireplace, but the attractive arch of the original brickwork had been elegantly exposed. The pine floorboards were stained a rich mahogany to match the dresser set against the back wall. A large glass chandelier dangled above the dining room table on which Kate had created a centrepiece of autumnal leaves that danced in the light of the candles.
“Wow,” said Amina, “This looks amazing!”
Clang ran a finger down one of the wallpaper seams where the glue hadn’t quite taken and the two edges were peeling apart.
“Did you do the papering yourself?” said Clang
As Kate laid the first course of roasted figs and parma ham before them Sean was complaining about a decision taken by the town planning council of Sefton, just the week before, to remove Antony Gormley’s collection of 100 naked cast iron men from the beach.
“It’s this type of thing that gives us town planners a bad name.”
“But they must have had a reason,” asked Clang.
“Well a few fools had to get rescued because they wandered out to see the furthest ones and got caught by the tide,” he shrugged his shoulders, “and the fisherman are all panicked they’re going to scrape the bottom of their boat-y-kins.”
“Oh I read about that,” said Andrew, “I liked the idea of the accessibility of the art. Apparently people painted their bollocks. It an interesting way of engaging with sculpture that you just don’t get in a gallery. What a shame.”
“Sure,” said Kate, slipping back into place, “but the council aren’t going to take the risk of being blamed for a fatality. Art so good it kills!”
Clang loves these types of discussions. She only ever seems to have them here at Andrew and Kate’s house with her three Uni friends. And Amina. Shaun has Amina now. Amina, who doesn’t often say very much. The argument will go round and round and she watches wide-eyed flicking her shiny black hair over her shoulder and squeezing Sean’s hand under the table. But then of course Amina works in a bank.
“Well that’s just it isn’t it?” said Sean, “Where do you draw the line between the council’s responsibility for keeping you safe and the individual’s responsibility to take care of themselves?”
Clang gave charity only where there was also an opportunity to encourage and correct. She carried in her head a small number of phrases that she deemed appropriate to inspire street sleepers away from their pavements and cardboard boxes. “This fifty pence is not going to save you, only you can do that.” If possible she liked to press the coin into the palm of a grubby hand and close the fingers over it, showing that she was not, like most people, afraid to touch them. She didn’t give to those men who walk up and down on the train apologising insincerely for ruining her journey. Because they do ruin it. With their false platitudes and their complete lack of humility. Or is it deference?
This is the kind of person that Catherine Lang is. She sees the world in black and white and carries a great deal of responsibility for keeping it just so. She follows where the women of her family have led. There have never been meagre expectations for Catherine Lang. Her family wait breathlessly in the front row for her to take the stage. She stalks about in the wings, awaiting her cue.
“I’ll tell you where the line lies,” said Clang, and she drew on the white linen tablecloth with her finger. She’d tucked her foot up under her on the chair so that she was sitting just a little higher at the table, resting on an elbow on the table, her finger curled around her chin, she leant forward and spoke.
“The council and or government’s responsibility and or organisation’s responsibility (let’s not forget about employers and health and safety now), is to provide the means for the individual to take care of themselves.” She thumped on the right of her invisible line with the side of her extended hand.
“And the responsibility of the individual,” she thumped on the left of the line, “is to utilise the means.”
Clang leant back in her chair, lifted her wine glass.
“So Sean, in your Gormley example, the responsibility of the council should be, and should never go beyond, providing the individual with the means to take care of themselves in that particular situation – we’re talking warning signs, tidal markers. That sort of thing. For the fisherman, buoys!” Clang waved her hand as she said this admiring how she had cut so deftly to heart of the matter.
“Anything more is a blatant infringement of the individual’s right to make their own decisions.”
“Sure,” said Kate, standing to clear the plates, “until someone dies because they didn’t read the sign or because they had left their reading glasses at home or because they don’t understand English.”
Clang took another sip of her wine.
The main course was marinated pork fillets roasted on rhubarb and served with roast potatoes. Each fillet had been stewed in oil, garlic and sage overnight, then hand wrapped in proscitto, and carefully cooked in greaseproof paper. Andrew had cut them diagonally and laid them across the plates, dribbled with sauce. Clang thought the roast potatoes looked a little insipid.
There were mutterings of approval from around the table. Clang had to raise her voice to return attention to the point of discussion.
“So Kate, do you mean to say, that those individuals who do take responsibility for their own lives, who actively make use of the facilities around them to protect their liberties and freedoms, should be denied those liberties and freedoms because some individuals can’t be bothered to take responsibility for themselves?”
Sean picked up his cutlery and began on the pork.
Kate sipped her wine.
“Andrew, this really is amazing!” said Sean. Amina nodded.
“No, Clang, that’s not quite what I meant. I was just trying to say that the theoretical ideal often falls down in practice. Mostly because people have what I like to term, legislative angst.” She smiled, “I agree with your principles but the reality is that councils, governments, organisations, the whole lot, are all just scared shitless of being sued. And I’ll concede, on occasion, disproportionately so.”
“But that’s just wrong,” said Clang, resting her fork on the edge of her plate, she reached for the napkin on her lap, drew it roughly across her mouth and then smoothed it back over her skirt.
“Legislation has to ensure that there is at least an onus on the individual to take care of themselves. I mean you see it all the time in employment law don’t you? You can’t just sue a company because someone is harassing you. You have to show that as an individual you’ve used the means that the company has provided to protect yourself.”
As Clang spoke, Amina, sitting on her right, set down her cutlery. Her chin dropped onto her chest and her long hair, as sleek as a black velvet curtain, hid her face so that Clang couldn’t see that she had begun to cry.
“If you’re going to sue for harassment, you can’t not have lodged a complaint, been through the tribunal, the whole thing. That’s why it works. If the individual has taken responsibility for themselves, and the company has provided them with the means to do so, then the company isn’t at fault.”
Sean reached out and took Amina’s hand. No one responded. Outside a car passed on the street. Just a bit too close to the road, thought Clang.
Kate said, “Amina?” and Andrew set down his knife and fork.
“She’s going through some stuff at work,” said Sean, lifting the curtain of Amina’s hair with one finger, stroking her cheek, “This guy she works with… Shall I tell them?”
Amina nodded but didn’t look up. Kate gestured at box of tissues on the top of the dresser and motioned for Clang to get them.
“Her boss,” said Sean, “has been saying stuff. Nothing major. Just odd little remarks that seem, you know, vaguely inappropriate. It’s hard to know whether he means anything by it.”
Amina sniffed, wiped her nose, but still didn’t look up.
“It sounds so stupid. Look, don’t stop eating,” she picked up her cutlery again.
“Last week we had this working lunch thing and we were half way through, talking about how we work together and he suddenly said ‘Oh I think there’s something else there, I really like you Amina.’”
She took a mouthful of pork, chewed, slowly, swallowed.
“It seems innocuous don’t you think? But it was the way he said it, long drawn out words. I just didn’t know what to say.”
“And then on the Sunday he sent her an email about some work and he’d signed it ‘You are brilliant and Wonderful, Love Roger’”.
“The work wasn’t that good,” said Amina, smiling.
Clang swallowed a mouthful of pork.
“Oh please, it’s so clear. He’s having a go! If you were a kid this would be grooming.”
Amina looked up. “Well no, I don’t think it is that clear really. He’s just not the type. I can’t tell whether he’s deliberately crossing boundaries,” she took a sip of wine, “Or whether he’s not even aware of them.”
“Married?” asked Kate
Amina nodded.
Clang reached for the salt, “You have to say something.”
Amina dropped her chin again, put her hands in her lap.
“But I don’t feel sure enough to say something. What if it’s just me being oversensitive you know? What if I’m wrong? Imagine how mortifying it would be if it was all a horrible misunderstanding.”
“Oh for godsakes, this is exactly what I meant earlier. The bank will have very clearly laid out policies on this type of thing. It doesn’t matter whether you’re right or wrong. It’s the equivalent of the tidal markers. Read the signs and get of the water, Amina.”
Clang set her cutlery down, and this time with both palm banged on the left hand side of her invisible line.
“Its up to you. I mean you just have to do it. Otherwise he gets away with it doesn’t he?”
Amina tugged at the napkin on her lap.
“Yes Clang, I hear you,” she said looking up, her cheeks flushed with colour “But to do anything about this kind of thing you have to be absolutely sure you’re right. One hundred percent certain ‘that’s’ what’s going on. It has to be the truth before you can speak it because by speaking it you make it real and hard and tangible and you can’t take it back. You have to believe it so much that you stop listening to anything that anyone else is telling you because if you listen to what they’re saying you might loose you conviction and stop seeing that you’re right, you’re right, you’re right.”
She stood up, her chair squeaking on the wood floor, the end of her napkin balled in one hand, “You have to say it to yourself, over and over again, standing on your soap box, ringing your bell.” She waved the napkin, “I’m right. I’m right. Clang, Clang, Clang.”
Amina dropped the napkin and turned out of the room. The CD had come to an end and over the soft hissing of the speakers, they all heard the creaking of the stairs and the click of the bathroom door closing. Sean got up and followed. Andrew sat dead still, cutlery poised on either side of his plate, mouth slightly open. He turned to look at Kate.
Clang stood up, “I’ll just get a glass of water.”
Above the kitchen sink, her reflection glared back from the black window. She looked at the dark rings beneath her eyes and the tatty ends of her hair on her shoulders, in need of a cut. Behind her at the other end of the imperfect kitchen that wasn’t hers, stood the two imperfect men, who also weren’t hers, talking in low voices. She could hear the soft patter of Amina’s small feet in the bathroom above. Sean said to Andrew, “Look I think we’ll probably head off, sorry mate, it’s been a long week you know. We’re both really tired.” The toilet flushed.
Clang walked out to face them. “No, it’s me who should go.”
She walked past them into the hall and lifted down her coat.
“I really am genuinely and completely sorry,” she said pulling her arms through the sleeves.
“Sometimes, I just don’t…” She swallowed. “I really, really never meant to upset anyone.”
“I know,” said Sean, “And so does Amina.”
“I’m a crap bell ringer huh? Missed my timing, came in too loud. Ruined the whole piece.” She smiled.
Kate came through from the dining room and she kissed her on the cheek. “I’m off to practice, darlings, and I am so dreadfully sorry.”
She swung the door closed behind her and stood for a few brief moments on the walk.
The train was packed with the Saturday night crowd of south Londoners sallying their way into town. She didn’t bother with a seat, and stood near the doors, her back against the glass partition.
Across from her was a black guy wearing jeans and white trainers, the wires of his music player disappearing up beneath his hooded top, possibly in his teens. As they drew into the next station at an elderly woman got up from her seat and brushed past Clang to get to the doors. She addressed the young man in a loud voice:
“Are you getting off?”
He took out an earphone, and cocked his head slightly towards her.
“Are you getting off?” she repeated without looking at him.
He shook his head.
“Well then get out of my way,” she burst.
There was more than enough room for her to pass him; he was leaning against the wall, she had the whole width of the doors. The train had stopped and so he reached for the ‘open’ button on her behalf. She shot out a hand and slapped his wrist out of the way. It made the hard sharp sound of whip.
Rage rose in Clang like a fire. How dare this woman? How dare she! He was clearly trying to help. He had been minding his own business. Clang took a step forward to intervene, to say something on his behalf, to strike back. But the boy took a step back into the carriage, one surprised hand still holding the earphone. His head dropped slightly and she felt the heat of his humiliation. How much worse would it be rescued by a young white woman?
But she felt she must say something, something to encourage the boy, to restore his sense of self worth. Something to remind him that not all white women are like that. That we live in a country, and in particular, a city, where do not, and will not tolerate such behaviour. The thing that Clang would say was: “Don’t worry mat, she’ll get what’s coming to her.” And she would say it when no one else could hear. It would be just what the boy needed to make him feel better.
As they stepped off the train he walked quickly towards the ticket barriers as if he was fleeing. She strode to catch up and was about to reach for his arm when she realised that he was humming; a soft but distinct melody. He lifted a hand, snapped his fingers, smiled.
Clang fell back.
Michael’s Hand
We are talking about the night that Michael set his hand on fire when he comes over to say “Hello”. We are even sitting at our old-favourite table in the very far corner of the bar against the windows. Jenna has the view out across the room, Emmie is on the edge to let her smoke drift out and me, I’m facing them. Three girls at a square table, a bottle of red wine in the middle.
“When I hear Cyndi Lauper,” says Jenna leaning across the table, “I can’t not…,” , she reaches out and touches Emmie’s arm, “Do you remember?” She holds her hands up on either side of her head, open palmed, thumbs tucked beneath her chin and sings “Shining through”. She draws out the first syllable, rolling it round in her mouth. I remember. The balls of my socked feet pirouetting on the smooth blue kitchen tiles, the kitchen table heaped with plastic cases and spilled silver discs. Waiting for the next track, slumped exhausted, pink-cheeked, in the kitchen chairs. Emmie shuffling through the CDs like cards. The neighbours banging on the walls. A pool of light spilled onto the patio step and beyond that the dark, wet garden.
It had rained through Saturday afternoon and all Sunday morning.
“We watched ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’,” I say.
“Weren’t you in a depression over some guy Amy?” says Emmie, “I seem to remember you being in your pyjamas all weekend!”
“Weren’t you?” I tease back.
We had curled up around the lounge, wrapped in duvets. Passed the popcorn bowl silently from one to another. Jenna with her legs curled under her on the sofa stroking a cushion on her lap. Me on the floor, back against the luke warm radiator. Emmie lying on the mat, chin propped up on her elbows.
Jenna passes me the bottle and I fill my glass and then Emmie’s.
In the evening we opened the curtains and the clouds had lifted and left a perfectly-washed evening, out to dry. We stood in the kitchen warming our hands on mugs of tea. The air was as clean as a fresh sheet inviting us to bed. I dropped my pyjama bottoms at the wardrobe door, pulled on high-heeled shoes, pushed the cold, thin ends of earrings through my lobes. I scribbled in my eyes and lips and laughed with the living of it. I put a pin in the day, in the moment. And smiled to myself, “Remember this. ‘When you are old and grey and full of sleep and nodding by the fire’. Remember this.”
Our meal arrives and the waitress gives the Cajun chicken to me and the rare steak to Jenna. We wait until she’s gone and then hand the correct plates to one another. Jenna is wearing a beautiful blue skirt that she keeps folding and unfolding under the table. She has a chain of beads round her neck, looped twice and glass earrings that catch the light. She looks so much older than I remember. Has it really only been year? And Emmie’s dark hair has been cut around her face; it hangs along the jaw in a nice straight line. She could be presenting the news in those sleek black trousers and the jacket. Buttoned all night, even though it’s warm in here.
When Michael dragged over a chair and his friend Richard, set their two pint glasses on our table, we had already drunk a bottle of wine. We ordered a second. And later a third. On the way home Jenna and Emmie sang in French. I walked in time, my heels clicking. Michael and Richard hung back, swinging their hands against their thighs. Coats were shrugged off onto the hall floor, scarves draped across the backs of chairs, the heating turned up high. We set tealight candles on the lounge table and Jenna lit them one by one. I remember the sticky ice crust on the vodka bottle as I dug it from the freezer, the wet ring it made on the tablecloth, passing the shot glass round and round the table. Now your turn, now mine. I felt like a tightrope walker unclipping my harness.
Emmie is leaning across the table, a lit cigarette in one hand. She asks “Do you remember it happening?” and as if on queue, Michael says from behind me, “Hello, Ladies.” He sets his pint glass down on the table. Jenna crosses her arms and leans back in her chair. I wonder if he is in here every night.
Richard had found the bottle of absinthe on a shelf in the kitchen and he knew what to do. He filled a glass and then dripped the liquor, Fairy liquid green, onto a spoon full of sugar. Held it over the candle till it bubbled and then tipped it into the glass. The hushed observers waited for the flame to catch. He put it out with his broad flat palm. We discovered later that you were supposed to use water. I remember the green trails creeping across the tablecloth like litmus paper. Tongues of flame dashed across the table and dripped down onto the carpet. We rocked with laughter until someone stamped it out.
Micheal’s hand is the only thing that bears a scar - a bracelet of discoloured skin around his wrist. You wouldn’t notice if you didn’t know.
The sharp smell of burning hair. He blew on it gently at first and then leapt out of his chair, waving it around. We all laughed as he hopped from one foot to the other, jiggling like a marionette.
He held it under the tap in the bath, Emmie leant against the tiles, smoking, said it looked like nothing at all. She put some ice in a tea towel and wrapped it all up. He didn’t say another thing about it. We went on to dancing in the kitchen and Jenna taught us all the Cyndi Lauper dance.
Months later Jenna bumped into him at Rogerio’s leaning over a pint of beer, smoking at the bar. He said he hadn’t been out since, because of his hand. He asked Jenna to join him for a drink but she said she had something to do. She felt sorry leaving him sitting there like that on his first night out.
She is picking at her chicken breast, pushing bits of feta and apricots through the couscous; leaving trails. No wonder she’s got so thin. Emmie turns a cigarette between two fingers. Her plate is pushed off to one side. She’s the only one of us that still smokes. It’s rollies now though. She likes the mechanics of creating them, pinching tobacco into the paper and smoothing it out. The delay is delicious, partially exonerating. She doesn’t like to get anything she doesn’t deserve
He says, “I didn’t go out for months you know,” and throws his head back and laughs. There is the hand that was on fire, holding a cigarette. We all do a fake laugh too. There is not much else to say.
“It seems like just yesterday,” I offer.
I remember opening the windows in the morning to let out the smell of cigarettes. There was an ashtray nestled in the bookshelf and footprints tracked across the carpet. A half empty glass abandoned on top of the toilet and toothpaste smeared on the mirror. In the kitchen the fridge door was open, and the margarine out on the counter without its lid. A knife had fallen onto the floor and left a long blonde smear of butter down the side of the cabinet.
“Were we drinking rum?” asks Jenna.
“No,” says Emmie, “It was tequila.”
“But, why would we light tequila?”
“It must have been rum.”
“Wasn’t it absinthe?” I ask.
Michael turns to me, vaguely surprised, and says: “Were you there, Amy?”
“When I hear Cyndi Lauper,” says Jenna leaning across the table, “I can’t not…,” , she reaches out and touches Emmie’s arm, “Do you remember?” She holds her hands up on either side of her head, open palmed, thumbs tucked beneath her chin and sings “Shining through”. She draws out the first syllable, rolling it round in her mouth. I remember. The balls of my socked feet pirouetting on the smooth blue kitchen tiles, the kitchen table heaped with plastic cases and spilled silver discs. Waiting for the next track, slumped exhausted, pink-cheeked, in the kitchen chairs. Emmie shuffling through the CDs like cards. The neighbours banging on the walls. A pool of light spilled onto the patio step and beyond that the dark, wet garden.
It had rained through Saturday afternoon and all Sunday morning.
“We watched ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’,” I say.
“Weren’t you in a depression over some guy Amy?” says Emmie, “I seem to remember you being in your pyjamas all weekend!”
“Weren’t you?” I tease back.
We had curled up around the lounge, wrapped in duvets. Passed the popcorn bowl silently from one to another. Jenna with her legs curled under her on the sofa stroking a cushion on her lap. Me on the floor, back against the luke warm radiator. Emmie lying on the mat, chin propped up on her elbows.
Jenna passes me the bottle and I fill my glass and then Emmie’s.
In the evening we opened the curtains and the clouds had lifted and left a perfectly-washed evening, out to dry. We stood in the kitchen warming our hands on mugs of tea. The air was as clean as a fresh sheet inviting us to bed. I dropped my pyjama bottoms at the wardrobe door, pulled on high-heeled shoes, pushed the cold, thin ends of earrings through my lobes. I scribbled in my eyes and lips and laughed with the living of it. I put a pin in the day, in the moment. And smiled to myself, “Remember this. ‘When you are old and grey and full of sleep and nodding by the fire’. Remember this.”
Our meal arrives and the waitress gives the Cajun chicken to me and the rare steak to Jenna. We wait until she’s gone and then hand the correct plates to one another. Jenna is wearing a beautiful blue skirt that she keeps folding and unfolding under the table. She has a chain of beads round her neck, looped twice and glass earrings that catch the light. She looks so much older than I remember. Has it really only been year? And Emmie’s dark hair has been cut around her face; it hangs along the jaw in a nice straight line. She could be presenting the news in those sleek black trousers and the jacket. Buttoned all night, even though it’s warm in here.
When Michael dragged over a chair and his friend Richard, set their two pint glasses on our table, we had already drunk a bottle of wine. We ordered a second. And later a third. On the way home Jenna and Emmie sang in French. I walked in time, my heels clicking. Michael and Richard hung back, swinging their hands against their thighs. Coats were shrugged off onto the hall floor, scarves draped across the backs of chairs, the heating turned up high. We set tealight candles on the lounge table and Jenna lit them one by one. I remember the sticky ice crust on the vodka bottle as I dug it from the freezer, the wet ring it made on the tablecloth, passing the shot glass round and round the table. Now your turn, now mine. I felt like a tightrope walker unclipping my harness.
Emmie is leaning across the table, a lit cigarette in one hand. She asks “Do you remember it happening?” and as if on queue, Michael says from behind me, “Hello, Ladies.” He sets his pint glass down on the table. Jenna crosses her arms and leans back in her chair. I wonder if he is in here every night.
Richard had found the bottle of absinthe on a shelf in the kitchen and he knew what to do. He filled a glass and then dripped the liquor, Fairy liquid green, onto a spoon full of sugar. Held it over the candle till it bubbled and then tipped it into the glass. The hushed observers waited for the flame to catch. He put it out with his broad flat palm. We discovered later that you were supposed to use water. I remember the green trails creeping across the tablecloth like litmus paper. Tongues of flame dashed across the table and dripped down onto the carpet. We rocked with laughter until someone stamped it out.
Micheal’s hand is the only thing that bears a scar - a bracelet of discoloured skin around his wrist. You wouldn’t notice if you didn’t know.
The sharp smell of burning hair. He blew on it gently at first and then leapt out of his chair, waving it around. We all laughed as he hopped from one foot to the other, jiggling like a marionette.
He held it under the tap in the bath, Emmie leant against the tiles, smoking, said it looked like nothing at all. She put some ice in a tea towel and wrapped it all up. He didn’t say another thing about it. We went on to dancing in the kitchen and Jenna taught us all the Cyndi Lauper dance.
Months later Jenna bumped into him at Rogerio’s leaning over a pint of beer, smoking at the bar. He said he hadn’t been out since, because of his hand. He asked Jenna to join him for a drink but she said she had something to do. She felt sorry leaving him sitting there like that on his first night out.
She is picking at her chicken breast, pushing bits of feta and apricots through the couscous; leaving trails. No wonder she’s got so thin. Emmie turns a cigarette between two fingers. Her plate is pushed off to one side. She’s the only one of us that still smokes. It’s rollies now though. She likes the mechanics of creating them, pinching tobacco into the paper and smoothing it out. The delay is delicious, partially exonerating. She doesn’t like to get anything she doesn’t deserve
He says, “I didn’t go out for months you know,” and throws his head back and laughs. There is the hand that was on fire, holding a cigarette. We all do a fake laugh too. There is not much else to say.
“It seems like just yesterday,” I offer.
I remember opening the windows in the morning to let out the smell of cigarettes. There was an ashtray nestled in the bookshelf and footprints tracked across the carpet. A half empty glass abandoned on top of the toilet and toothpaste smeared on the mirror. In the kitchen the fridge door was open, and the margarine out on the counter without its lid. A knife had fallen onto the floor and left a long blonde smear of butter down the side of the cabinet.
“Were we drinking rum?” asks Jenna.
“No,” says Emmie, “It was tequila.”
“But, why would we light tequila?”
“It must have been rum.”
“Wasn’t it absinthe?” I ask.
Michael turns to me, vaguely surprised, and says: “Were you there, Amy?”
Enough
Catherine in her flat house shoes, watch swinging at her wrist, hair in a bun tighter than knitting climbs the stairs again, feet heavy with reluctance, fingers gripping the polished handrail, potato-mud beneath her nails, pill of anger on her tongue. Her tea sits cooling on the kitchen counter.
Her father waits white as the sheets, one thin claw above the covers, gummy eyed, smells of old breath and empty cupboards, coughs stains onto the sheets.
Her father waits white as the sheets, one thin claw above the covers, gummy eyed, smells of old breath and empty cupboards, coughs stains onto the sheets.
No Dancing Allowed
Last night I did a new etching. I’d been sitting at my kitchen table leafing through a book of Edward Hopper paintings, my fingers through the handle of a coffee mug, the remnants of the paper spread out around me. The light faded and I plugged in a lamp, opened my sketchbook to a new page and drew the pub at the end of my street. The green one. With the mosaic tiled floor and unmatched tables and chairs. The smooth dark wood and tea light candles on the tables. You must remember it. It’s still the same, well no, it’s less busy. A new one has opened up across the road.
I drew a man, sitting on a stool at the bar, reading. And before I knew it he was wearing your jeans and those old brown moccasins that you’ve walked in so long you kind of step over the sides. Your Saturday shoes. I imagined walking into that bar and seeing you there like that, waiting for me.
You were resting your elbows on the newspaper, one hand holding back the hair off your forehead. And you were sitting on the stool just like you do, a bit too far away from the counter with your heels up on the crossbars and your knees wide apart. You had your pint glass perfectly positioned so that you didn’t even have to look up to reach for it.
I drew the hair around your ear and the watch on your wrist, and then I touched you on the shoulder to say hello. It’s so long since I’ve seen you. You looked up and smiled, stood too quickly. The newspaper slid off the bar onto the floor and we both bent to pick it up. “Sorry, “ I said. You kissed me hurriedly on each cheek and asked me what I’d like to drink. You leaned over the bar to order, folding your newspaper at the same time. Wrapping it up on itself, rolling and folding, and then stuffing it into the outer pocket of your bag. I hated that you’re so rough with things like that. You used to fold the page corners of my books and bend their covers. Now, when I pick them out of the bookshelf, I know that you’ve read them.
I had my coat in my hand. You took it from me without asking and hung it on the hook next to yours.
Of course, neither of us knew where to begin. I smiled. “How are you?” I asked. And you smiled. Your finger went round and round a knot in the wood of the bar. I remembered you tracing on my skin and held onto the edges of my chair with both hands.
I hatched in the wallpaper and the rest of the floor, added flowers in a vase, an ashtray further along the bar. I told you about my new job and going diving in Egypt, asked about your dog and what your friends were doing. I gave you back a cufflink I’d found in an old handbag and I reminded you of the wedding we’d been at when you wore it. Your suit had been too hot and my dress had been too tight.
Then in the corner of the bar, I drew a girl, dancing; a glass of red wine in one out flung hand. I gave her long, straight hair falling around her face. She was looking at her shoes, one heel lifted off the floor. We stopped talking to watch. I drew the barman waving at her to sit down. There’s no dancing allowed in there. They’ve even got a sign behind the bar saying so, can you believe? We never got dancing right did we? I hated the spectacle of our mismatching, banging into one another, stepping on your toes. This bar was our neutral ground. You did not ask and I did not decline.
I put my pencil down and rolled it backwards and forwards beneath the palm of my hand. Clickety, click, clickety click. I looked at you sitting there alone at the bar, in your black roll-neck jumper, with the empty stool beside you and I started to cry. I pictured all the empty spaces I’d made when I left – the passenger seat in your car, the left hand-side of the bed, the second toothbrush holder above the basin. And of course I wasn’t crying for you, I was crying for me.
I said, “I miss you. I miss you”, and because I didn’t want to look at you, I hung my head and the tears dropped onto my skirt. I know what you would say. You’d remind me that I was the one who left you. And that you’ve moved on. That you’re seeing someone else now. I know, I know. I put my hands up over my face. And you’d say wasn’t I so much happier now; didn’t I remember how I’d always been crying. “But I’m still crying, “ I said out loud, laughed and leaned back in my chair. I made myself a cup of tea and stood drinking it at the window. Outside the wind had picked up and I could see the silhouettes of the trees shaking against the pink night sky. I opened the window to hear them better.
When I turned back there was the drawing, with time slowed right down, the moment turning like a coin on the bar, and me waiting to see which way it would fall. I turned the pencil round and with the eraser made a small round bald patch on the back of your head. And then to finish, on the left hand side, I added her hand pressed against the glass on the outside of the door, pushing it inwards. I gave her long fingers, with careful nails.
I traced it all upside down onto the waxed metal plate, scratched out the lines with a fine pointed pick. I filled the large white tub with acid and dropped it in, holding the corners with my rubber gloves. After it was washed and dry I rolled thick black ink into the folds of your clothes and the shadows between your fingers. Then I laid the plate face up on the press, draped the soft wet paper on top, and turned the crank of the handle to push it through. When I peeled back the paper, there you were sitting in the pub at the end of my street, reading, a coin on the bar and two coats on adjacent hooks.
I drew a man, sitting on a stool at the bar, reading. And before I knew it he was wearing your jeans and those old brown moccasins that you’ve walked in so long you kind of step over the sides. Your Saturday shoes. I imagined walking into that bar and seeing you there like that, waiting for me.
You were resting your elbows on the newspaper, one hand holding back the hair off your forehead. And you were sitting on the stool just like you do, a bit too far away from the counter with your heels up on the crossbars and your knees wide apart. You had your pint glass perfectly positioned so that you didn’t even have to look up to reach for it.
I drew the hair around your ear and the watch on your wrist, and then I touched you on the shoulder to say hello. It’s so long since I’ve seen you. You looked up and smiled, stood too quickly. The newspaper slid off the bar onto the floor and we both bent to pick it up. “Sorry, “ I said. You kissed me hurriedly on each cheek and asked me what I’d like to drink. You leaned over the bar to order, folding your newspaper at the same time. Wrapping it up on itself, rolling and folding, and then stuffing it into the outer pocket of your bag. I hated that you’re so rough with things like that. You used to fold the page corners of my books and bend their covers. Now, when I pick them out of the bookshelf, I know that you’ve read them.
I had my coat in my hand. You took it from me without asking and hung it on the hook next to yours.
Of course, neither of us knew where to begin. I smiled. “How are you?” I asked. And you smiled. Your finger went round and round a knot in the wood of the bar. I remembered you tracing on my skin and held onto the edges of my chair with both hands.
I hatched in the wallpaper and the rest of the floor, added flowers in a vase, an ashtray further along the bar. I told you about my new job and going diving in Egypt, asked about your dog and what your friends were doing. I gave you back a cufflink I’d found in an old handbag and I reminded you of the wedding we’d been at when you wore it. Your suit had been too hot and my dress had been too tight.
Then in the corner of the bar, I drew a girl, dancing; a glass of red wine in one out flung hand. I gave her long, straight hair falling around her face. She was looking at her shoes, one heel lifted off the floor. We stopped talking to watch. I drew the barman waving at her to sit down. There’s no dancing allowed in there. They’ve even got a sign behind the bar saying so, can you believe? We never got dancing right did we? I hated the spectacle of our mismatching, banging into one another, stepping on your toes. This bar was our neutral ground. You did not ask and I did not decline.
I put my pencil down and rolled it backwards and forwards beneath the palm of my hand. Clickety, click, clickety click. I looked at you sitting there alone at the bar, in your black roll-neck jumper, with the empty stool beside you and I started to cry. I pictured all the empty spaces I’d made when I left – the passenger seat in your car, the left hand-side of the bed, the second toothbrush holder above the basin. And of course I wasn’t crying for you, I was crying for me.
I said, “I miss you. I miss you”, and because I didn’t want to look at you, I hung my head and the tears dropped onto my skirt. I know what you would say. You’d remind me that I was the one who left you. And that you’ve moved on. That you’re seeing someone else now. I know, I know. I put my hands up over my face. And you’d say wasn’t I so much happier now; didn’t I remember how I’d always been crying. “But I’m still crying, “ I said out loud, laughed and leaned back in my chair. I made myself a cup of tea and stood drinking it at the window. Outside the wind had picked up and I could see the silhouettes of the trees shaking against the pink night sky. I opened the window to hear them better.
When I turned back there was the drawing, with time slowed right down, the moment turning like a coin on the bar, and me waiting to see which way it would fall. I turned the pencil round and with the eraser made a small round bald patch on the back of your head. And then to finish, on the left hand side, I added her hand pressed against the glass on the outside of the door, pushing it inwards. I gave her long fingers, with careful nails.
I traced it all upside down onto the waxed metal plate, scratched out the lines with a fine pointed pick. I filled the large white tub with acid and dropped it in, holding the corners with my rubber gloves. After it was washed and dry I rolled thick black ink into the folds of your clothes and the shadows between your fingers. Then I laid the plate face up on the press, draped the soft wet paper on top, and turned the crank of the handle to push it through. When I peeled back the paper, there you were sitting in the pub at the end of my street, reading, a coin on the bar and two coats on adjacent hooks.
My Inadequate Hair
“If only,” he said, “you had curly hair.” We were lying on a blanket in the sun, in the park. The newspapers were heaped at our feet. I had my head in his lap and he was pressing his fingers into my scalp, rubbing in small tight circles. “Oh well,” I thought. It had been fun.
Going up to get down
Jack is on his way back to his desk to, as they’ve put it, “have a think about it” and the foyer of the 6th floor is unusually crowded; only one of the lifts is working. On the far wall soldiers firing from behind a blockade, loom from a huge black and white print. Beneath it some journalists are clutched over a folio of photographs, paging, pointing. Jack stands off to one side, staring out of the window across the rooftops of the neighbouring buildings. The faint outline of his face hovers ghostlike over the skyline. He presses down a stray tuft of hair that has sprung up on his crown.
Jack had waited outside the boardroom, watching the IT Director and the woman from HR, heads bent over sheets of paper, making notes. He counted fifteen straight-backed chairs, two potted plants and seven framed front pages of the paper. One read: “Diana is Dead” and another “Does this mean War?” They nodded to one another and then looked up. The director motioned Jack to come in, offered him a coffee, clipped the cup onto the saucer and slid it across the smooth wooden table. He didn’t really like coffee, but he drank it anyway. The director leant forward over the table, elbows apart, fingertips pressed together.
“Now Jack,” he’d said, “I’m sure you can guess what this is about?” He raised one eyebrow and paused. Jack shifted in his chair and tucked his hands beneath his thighs.
“We’re worried about you Jack. We get the impression you’re unhappy. That you’re not happy here at the paper.” They didn’t want to alarm him. Would he like some sugar for his coffee? The matching white jar was pushed in his direction. And the meeting wasn’t about poor performance, more a lack of engagement. “Perhaps failure to thrive?” suggested the HR woman. She smiled and set her pen down next to her notebook.
In his last appraisal, Jack’s manager, described him as a quiet chap who preferred to work alone. Jack had vigorously nodded his agreement. They’d talked about the fact that Jack did not like meetings and preferred to be left to get on with things. Jack explained that in fact, this was one of the main reasons he had become a programmer; no one talked in the computer lab at school. His manager felt that Jack would benefit from working more closely with his colleagues. He had gone on to encourage Jack to be a bit more proactive, a bit more of a team player, a bit more like Jessica. Jessica, with her long blonde ponytail swinging from side to side as she strides round the building; wearing her enthusiasm like a badge. Jack thinks she would do well in palliative care. He imagines her standing at his bedside asking her questions:
“What motivates you Jack?”
“Do you want to talk about it Jack?”
“Jack,” said the IT Director, “This is a people kind of company. We’re all about the intellectual property. We like everyone to get stuck in, we like people to get involved. And Jack, we want to help people to get somewhere. Do you know what I mean?” Jack rubbed his hand across his forehead. He remembered the white calves of the IT Director flashing across the finish line at the company fun-day. He’d been pushing a wheelbarrow with Jessica in it, her legs dangling over the front.
The director poured himself another cup of coffee. “We don’t want you to be,” he glanced up, “unhappy.” Jack had smiled stiffly.
The woman from HR had been wondering whether Jack would like to move on, or perhaps take some time off? She put her hands flat on the surface of the table and tipped her head to the side as she said it. One of her long silver earrings fell against her cheek. Was Jack interested in taking redundancy? It was being offered, did he understand? Not obliged. He could go or stay, as he chose. They really did just want him to be happy. The director stood and extended his hand. The handshake was vigorous. “You have a think about it Jack, you have a little think about it, and then get back to us.”
Outside the lift, a restless woman is muttering to her companion. They disappear round the corner to the stairwell, heels clipping on the polished marble floor. The lift doors open and Jack steps past the journalists to lean against the mirrored back wall. The button console has illuminated numbers for every floor. Jack reaches out and presses “B”.
He still has the first programming book he bought: “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Visual Basic” with it’s enticingly titled opening chapter: “An Introduction to Programming: A Walk on the Wild Side”. He kept the book all through high school and even university. Just last week he took it out of the bottom drawer of his desk and thumbing through “Looping with Do and Until – Around and Around we go” smiled at a blue-biro note from his fourteen-year-old self: “WOW, remember this!”
The lift descends to the basement and the doors open but Jack doesn’t move. He is staring at the familiar white wall where he usually turns left, walks past the PC support team, past the network specialists, down to the corner where the programmers sit. Last week there was a poster on it saying “Wellbeing Classes at Lunch Time: Talk about your troubles with people who care”. Each morning, he puts down his bag, pulls out the chair, sits down, moves the keyboard closer, logs on. For a man who likes to loop with ‘do’ and ‘until’, it’s a comforting pattern. There is a long cold cup of tea waiting for him on his desk.
Jessica had once told Jack, leaning forward palms on her knees, that if she didn’t work here at the newspaper she wouldn’t want to work anywhere else.
“Imagine doing IT at a company where you just sit at your desk all day and don’t go out and chat to people and have discussions about things.”
“Imagine,” said Jack.
The doors begin to close and on their shiny silver surface the two halves of his reflection draw towards one another until there he is, Jack with a line down the middle.
He glances at the console of buttons, reaches out and then drops his arm. The lift must be controlled by a computer. And it would be programmatically impossible to know he’s here. It’s not going to suddenly open its mouth and spit him out like a loose tooth. He looks down at his two shoes, next to one another on the red-brown swirls of the carpet, hooks a lock of hair behind his ear. The silence is so beautiful that he coughs, just the once, to reaffirm it.
The basics of most programs are simple.
If the number seven button is pressed
Then go to the seventh floor
Else wait.
That sort of thing. Handling the more unusual situations, the exceptions, is where it gets complicated.
If the lift is already on three when three is pressed
Then open the doors.
No matter how diligent the programmer is, there will always be unpredicted events, unhandled exceptions, like Jack, that will crop up when you’re least expecting them.
The lift bleeps and begins to rise and he almost laughs out loud. Talk about a walk on the wild side.
A short, rather wide-hipped woman wearing a blue skirt, steps into the lift on the ground floor. She looks at the seven unlit buttons, presses five and then turns to Jack, eyebrows raised questioningly, finger poised. Jack remembers his exacerbated mother, hands on hips, shoulders stooped to glare into the car: “I’m only going to ask you once Jack, are you going to get out and come into the house and have your lunch, or are you going to stay there all day? Which is it going to be?” She jiggled the house keys in one hand, “Mmmmh? Which one Jack?”
The world, it would seem, is not designed for travel without destination.
“Four,” says Jack
The doors open on the fourth floor and when Jack makes no move to exit, the blue skirt swooshes round, and the woman says, smiling, “This is four” and then presses her finger firmly onto the ‘open door’ button. Jack steps hesitantly out. He’s not been on the fourth floor before and has no idea what happens up here. His can feel himself blushing as he pauses uncertainly, feet together. The office spreads out to his left and he is convinced he can hear a settling of silence - like when someone uninvited steps into a conversation. He checks his watch in what he hopes is a purposeful manner, moves the face back and forth across his wrist. The lift doors slide slowly closed behind him. He takes a deep breath, draws his shoulders back and then strides over to the newspaper stand directly opposite the doors, picks up a copy. He unfolds the paper and turns noisily through a few pages. At page 14 he taps an article with his finger, refolds the newspaper, tucks it under his arm and turns on one foot, back towards the lift doors. He presses the down arrow and waits.
When Jack was ten there had been an obsession with choose-your-own adventure books. At the end of each chapter you were required to make a decision and follow the story onto a specified page according to the choice you’d made. “If you think Araya should head west to seek water, turn to page 27 or, if you think Araya should seek shelter in the village, turn to page 81.” He hated the randomness of the choices, you just had to take a chance and pick one. Jack had got stuck in the underwater forest for two whole weeks. Back and forth he went between pages 73 and 36, reading the same paragraphs over and over again.
He gets back into the lift with two young men. They have neat lines pressed into the front of their trousers and the one has little padlocks for cufflinks.
“Floor?”
“Basement” Jack says and puts his hands into his jeans pockets.
“It’s set in a newspaper,” says the one with the padlocks, “That’s why they’re filming it here. Scarlett Johansen is playing a journalist.”
“Playing a hot journalist!” interjects the other.
“She’s working under cover investigating something or other, and then she falls in love with the guy she’s writing about. So it’s like, does she stay being the undercover person and keep the guy and all that, or does she go back to being her boring old self, get the story etcetera?”
“Tell me she shags someone over the editor’s desk.”
“Oh yeah sure, that’s the one they’re filming on Saturday to see if it’s possible to get you to come in on the weekend.” They both laugh.
The lift pings its arrival on the third floor.
“Scarlett Johansen ready yourself, we are coming for you!” says the man with the padlocks, hoicking up his trousers.
The windows of the third floor are blacked out with curtains and huge lamps glare down on the far corner of the room. A microphone on a boom sways above the crowd of onlookers. One man has lifted his chair up onto his desk and is sitting, arms folded, watching. A woman carrying a stack of film cans gets into the lift; the red tape running round their sides says “URGENT: UN-DEVELOPED STOCK”. On top of the cans Jack can see a folded open copy of the script:
INT THE NEWSROOM - DAY
Julia is leaning on Paul’s desk. Her head is in her hands.
JULIA
Look Paul, I understand what you’re trying to say,
but I can’t.
Julia starts to cry.
JULIA
I’m just…. I can’t be that person anymore.
She gets out on ground and as the lift doors open once again in the basement, Jack depresses the close door button with a firm finger. He knows exactly who Scarlett Johansen is. Last Saturday night he rented “Girl with the Pearl Earring” from his local video store. The picture in the film, the model in the picture, the girl being the model, the actress being the girl, him watching the film and now the real woman, Scarlett Johansen, in his building. There’s a looping symmetry to it that appeals – like opening one of those Russian Dolls. And what’s more:
If Miss Johansen is not likely to be the type of woman to take the stairs
And If this is the only operational lift,
Then at some point, during the course of the day, she is going to get in it.
Else? There is no else; Jack is going to be waiting.
On the seventh floor someone steps up to the doors, and then seeing him standing there, takes a surprised step back. This is one of what Jack dubs ‘the turns’ – where the lift reaches one of the extremes of the building, and the expectation that he should alight is all the greater because there is nowhere else to go. He begins to explain that he is actually going back down and gives a small apologetic wave of his hand to cover the missing end of his sentence. After three or four of these incidents he perfects the gesture in lieu of any explanation. It involves a quick flick of the wrist that is both welcoming in a ‘No, no, its ok, get into the lift’ way and also directional in an ‘I’m going up’ or ‘I’m going down’ way. It’s astounding how many people immediately understand what he means. Of course he is not alone; thanks to the broken lift there are lots of other people who are going up to get down.
Two men in mid-conversation get in on the second floor, pausing only briefly. They barely notice Jack. The taller of the two is wearing a pale linen suits, its back lightly crumpled, as if he has been sitting down for too long. He talks rapidly and angrily, pointing at the shorter man’s chest:
“Thing is right, if you don’t do something about it, its cyclic; the whole process, repeats and repeats and repeats.” He stabs the syllables: “In perpetuity.” Jack thinks of a furious bee he’d watched on a bus slamming itself against the window. It would crawl slowly up the glass to the very rim where centimetres from fresh air, it would take flight and drop back down again to the base of the frame, and bang, bang, bang. He watched this loop over and over for the whole length of the bus journey. After he got off, he thought of the bus going round and round its route, with the bee inside going up and down the window. In perpetuity. Although of course the bee would die. Eventually.
The lift gets busier after noon as people head to lunch. Women scratch in their handbags, discussing where they will buy their sandwiches – “Pret or that little independent Turkish place on the corner?” Just after one o’clock it is so full that bodies are pressed uncomfortably against one another, and the doors open to disappointed faces on each floor that sigh and turn on their heels to take the stairs. Jack wedges himself into the back corner, crosses his arms over his chest.. Very few people speak until they’re out, snippets of their conversations drift back. “Suggested that he just give up. Best thing for it really. There’s nothing more I…” and “That’s what she says she wants but, honestly now, do you think it’s ethical?”
And then they are all back again after lunch, and no one comments on the fact that he is still there, though one woman, with a carrier bag of sandwiches, chewing on a soft drink straw, points a finger at him and smiles. She gets out on three.
Jack shifts his weight from one foot to the other, tugs down the hem of his T-Shirt. This could be it. The lights at the far end have been turned off and some of the black curtains pulled open, spilling daylight in. There’s a great heap of cables lying on the floor near the lift, and a woman just out of sight to the left is calling for water. But no one is waiting to get in.
As the doors start to ease closed a woman wearing a headset rushes towards him, her hand stuck out in front of her calling: “Hold the lift, please.” He doesn’t move and she has to repeat it – “Hold the doors!” Jack jabs frantically at the ‘three’. The lift yawn open again and he apologies. She frowns, puts a foot in the door, and beckons off to the right. Two men wheel over a large trolley-like piece of equipment; it has rubber wheels that creak over the metal lip of the lift. Jack is forced to step right back against the smoked-glass mirrors.
“Alright?”
Jack nods.
By four o’clock Jack is desperate to go to the toilet. He stands quietly legs crossed, jaw clenched as long as he can and then bursts out on five, where the bathrooms are directly opposite the lift. He hops as he pees. Two floors below Scarlett could be gliding down to her waiting limousine. He skids back, the bathroom door slamming behind him, leaves a wet fingerprint on the down button. A man waiting adjacent to him glances over and says: “Stairs might be quicker mate.”
Jessica is in the lift.
“Oh my God, Jack,” she says, eyes widening with delight, “Where the hell have you been? Did you have your meeting? Peter’s going mental.” She gestures on either side of her head with two rotating fingers. “He called the director and everything to find out what time you finished the meeting and where you were.” She is standing in his spot and so he’s stopped just inside the closing doors. On the back wall behind her, he can see the curious effect of too many mirrors in such a small space, the reflection of Jessica over and over, diminishing.
“Jack, are you ok?” she rubs the side of her nose, “That guy from the Arts Desk called again. He’s getting some sort of error message, wants you to call him back. I wrote it all down. It’s on your desk.” Jack watches her mouth opening and closing. “Are you going back to your desk now? What are you doing up here? Hey, did you know that Scarlett Johansen is filming on third?”
“Are you getting off?” says a woman on the 7th floor.
“Yes,” says Jessica.
“No,” says Jack.
She turns and waves goodbye.
This time when the doors open on the third floor there’s a group of people huddled around the lift, facing Jack. He untucks his hands from behind his back and crosses them firmly over his chest. One woman has a clipboard propped on her hip, next to her a tall man is swinging a roll of thick, silver tape around one finger. Standing in the middle, is the real Scarlett Johansen. She is lifting her sunglasses up towards her face, and for a very, very brief instant, he catches her eye over the top of the huge fly-lenses.
An assistant gets into the lift and walks towards Jack. She touches his arm and says in a honeyed American accent “Excuse me sir, I wonder if you could do us just the biggest favour? Miss Johansen, and,” she indicates the group of people waiting at the lift with a quick round circular motion over her shoulder, “well, there’s quite a few of us. Would you mind?” The doors begin to close and her arm darts out, a manicured red nail depresses the open button. She smiles at Jack: “Thanks so much, really, thanks.” The grip on his forearm tightens and he is directed out of the lift.
On the other side of the now deserted floor a man is rolling up a cable, wrapping it over his hooked thumb and down around his elbow, pausing to yank as the plug-end catches somewhere amongst the debris. The scene reminds Jack of the opening sequence of his all-time-favourite computer game, ‘Space Quest’: in which the character he plays, emerges from a lift to survey the spaceship, devastated by an explosion. Jack picks his way between some desks to reach the window; down below he can see a sleek black car waiting alongside the pavement. Progression to the next stage of the game requires a careful search through the mangled equipment and fallen aliens, typing in commands such as “Look in cupboard” or “Take rope ”. It took Jack weeks of careful logical deduction to work out the correct sequence in which to perform these actions, to find all the little objects he needed to unlock the way to next level.
From a table littered with tissues and ear buds, he picks up a small plastic box of brown eye shadow and rubs his finger onto silky surface of the colour. He flattens out a tissue with is palm, makes a fingerprint on it and is about to continue through the remaining fingers on his hand when he spots a small gold case. He clicks open the clasp and rolls the lipstick inside around with one finger before clicking it closed. The outside of the case is engraved “To SJ, My Darling”.
Jack takes the stairs two at time, swings round the banister on each level, the soles of his shoes clapping onto the linoleum floors. He leaps the last few steps, fringe flopping over his eyes and bursts through the foyer and revolving door. The entourage are gathered on the pavement alongside the black car. He calls out, “Miss Johansen, Miss Johansen,” waves with one hand and in the other upturned palm, holds out the lipstick case. Scarlett lifts her glasses and squints at him. With a gentle sweep of one hand she parts the group and walks back towards Jack, head tilted slightly to one side, her lips parted. He holds the lipstick case with two fingers, arm stretched out towards her like he is feeding an animal with sharp teeth. She turns the case over in her hand, looks back at Jack almost shyly and says, “Thank you.” She turns and begins to walk back to the waiting car.
“Can I ask you something?” Jack bursts out and she stops, looks at him over one shoulder.
“This is a, uh, a, a bit weird,” he begins. She adjusts the strap of her handbag, and then puts on her glasses and begins to walk away again. Jack has to raise his voice slightly: “I was just wondering whether you think it’s better to be yourself or to be, uh, someone else. To be what other people think you should be?” He hears the swish of the revolving door turning out someone else behind him, she looks back at him over one shoulder.
“Like is it better to be Scarlett or, uh, is it better to be Julia?”
“Julia? My character?”
Jack nods, hands hanging limply at his sides.
Scarlett pulls the glasses down onto the tip of her nose. “Julia isn’t real. Of course it’s better to be real than someone you’re not.”
Jack watches until the car pulls out and disappears off into the London traffic. He reaches into the back pocket of his jeans for the security pass that will let him back into the building and realises that he has left it on his desk.
Jack had waited outside the boardroom, watching the IT Director and the woman from HR, heads bent over sheets of paper, making notes. He counted fifteen straight-backed chairs, two potted plants and seven framed front pages of the paper. One read: “Diana is Dead” and another “Does this mean War?” They nodded to one another and then looked up. The director motioned Jack to come in, offered him a coffee, clipped the cup onto the saucer and slid it across the smooth wooden table. He didn’t really like coffee, but he drank it anyway. The director leant forward over the table, elbows apart, fingertips pressed together.
“Now Jack,” he’d said, “I’m sure you can guess what this is about?” He raised one eyebrow and paused. Jack shifted in his chair and tucked his hands beneath his thighs.
“We’re worried about you Jack. We get the impression you’re unhappy. That you’re not happy here at the paper.” They didn’t want to alarm him. Would he like some sugar for his coffee? The matching white jar was pushed in his direction. And the meeting wasn’t about poor performance, more a lack of engagement. “Perhaps failure to thrive?” suggested the HR woman. She smiled and set her pen down next to her notebook.
In his last appraisal, Jack’s manager, described him as a quiet chap who preferred to work alone. Jack had vigorously nodded his agreement. They’d talked about the fact that Jack did not like meetings and preferred to be left to get on with things. Jack explained that in fact, this was one of the main reasons he had become a programmer; no one talked in the computer lab at school. His manager felt that Jack would benefit from working more closely with his colleagues. He had gone on to encourage Jack to be a bit more proactive, a bit more of a team player, a bit more like Jessica. Jessica, with her long blonde ponytail swinging from side to side as she strides round the building; wearing her enthusiasm like a badge. Jack thinks she would do well in palliative care. He imagines her standing at his bedside asking her questions:
“What motivates you Jack?”
“Do you want to talk about it Jack?”
“Jack,” said the IT Director, “This is a people kind of company. We’re all about the intellectual property. We like everyone to get stuck in, we like people to get involved. And Jack, we want to help people to get somewhere. Do you know what I mean?” Jack rubbed his hand across his forehead. He remembered the white calves of the IT Director flashing across the finish line at the company fun-day. He’d been pushing a wheelbarrow with Jessica in it, her legs dangling over the front.
The director poured himself another cup of coffee. “We don’t want you to be,” he glanced up, “unhappy.” Jack had smiled stiffly.
The woman from HR had been wondering whether Jack would like to move on, or perhaps take some time off? She put her hands flat on the surface of the table and tipped her head to the side as she said it. One of her long silver earrings fell against her cheek. Was Jack interested in taking redundancy? It was being offered, did he understand? Not obliged. He could go or stay, as he chose. They really did just want him to be happy. The director stood and extended his hand. The handshake was vigorous. “You have a think about it Jack, you have a little think about it, and then get back to us.”
Outside the lift, a restless woman is muttering to her companion. They disappear round the corner to the stairwell, heels clipping on the polished marble floor. The lift doors open and Jack steps past the journalists to lean against the mirrored back wall. The button console has illuminated numbers for every floor. Jack reaches out and presses “B”.
He still has the first programming book he bought: “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Visual Basic” with it’s enticingly titled opening chapter: “An Introduction to Programming: A Walk on the Wild Side”. He kept the book all through high school and even university. Just last week he took it out of the bottom drawer of his desk and thumbing through “Looping with Do and Until – Around and Around we go” smiled at a blue-biro note from his fourteen-year-old self: “WOW, remember this!”
The lift descends to the basement and the doors open but Jack doesn’t move. He is staring at the familiar white wall where he usually turns left, walks past the PC support team, past the network specialists, down to the corner where the programmers sit. Last week there was a poster on it saying “Wellbeing Classes at Lunch Time: Talk about your troubles with people who care”. Each morning, he puts down his bag, pulls out the chair, sits down, moves the keyboard closer, logs on. For a man who likes to loop with ‘do’ and ‘until’, it’s a comforting pattern. There is a long cold cup of tea waiting for him on his desk.
Jessica had once told Jack, leaning forward palms on her knees, that if she didn’t work here at the newspaper she wouldn’t want to work anywhere else.
“Imagine doing IT at a company where you just sit at your desk all day and don’t go out and chat to people and have discussions about things.”
“Imagine,” said Jack.
The doors begin to close and on their shiny silver surface the two halves of his reflection draw towards one another until there he is, Jack with a line down the middle.
He glances at the console of buttons, reaches out and then drops his arm. The lift must be controlled by a computer. And it would be programmatically impossible to know he’s here. It’s not going to suddenly open its mouth and spit him out like a loose tooth. He looks down at his two shoes, next to one another on the red-brown swirls of the carpet, hooks a lock of hair behind his ear. The silence is so beautiful that he coughs, just the once, to reaffirm it.
The basics of most programs are simple.
If the number seven button is pressed
Then go to the seventh floor
Else wait.
That sort of thing. Handling the more unusual situations, the exceptions, is where it gets complicated.
If the lift is already on three when three is pressed
Then open the doors.
No matter how diligent the programmer is, there will always be unpredicted events, unhandled exceptions, like Jack, that will crop up when you’re least expecting them.
The lift bleeps and begins to rise and he almost laughs out loud. Talk about a walk on the wild side.
A short, rather wide-hipped woman wearing a blue skirt, steps into the lift on the ground floor. She looks at the seven unlit buttons, presses five and then turns to Jack, eyebrows raised questioningly, finger poised. Jack remembers his exacerbated mother, hands on hips, shoulders stooped to glare into the car: “I’m only going to ask you once Jack, are you going to get out and come into the house and have your lunch, or are you going to stay there all day? Which is it going to be?” She jiggled the house keys in one hand, “Mmmmh? Which one Jack?”
The world, it would seem, is not designed for travel without destination.
“Four,” says Jack
The doors open on the fourth floor and when Jack makes no move to exit, the blue skirt swooshes round, and the woman says, smiling, “This is four” and then presses her finger firmly onto the ‘open door’ button. Jack steps hesitantly out. He’s not been on the fourth floor before and has no idea what happens up here. His can feel himself blushing as he pauses uncertainly, feet together. The office spreads out to his left and he is convinced he can hear a settling of silence - like when someone uninvited steps into a conversation. He checks his watch in what he hopes is a purposeful manner, moves the face back and forth across his wrist. The lift doors slide slowly closed behind him. He takes a deep breath, draws his shoulders back and then strides over to the newspaper stand directly opposite the doors, picks up a copy. He unfolds the paper and turns noisily through a few pages. At page 14 he taps an article with his finger, refolds the newspaper, tucks it under his arm and turns on one foot, back towards the lift doors. He presses the down arrow and waits.
When Jack was ten there had been an obsession with choose-your-own adventure books. At the end of each chapter you were required to make a decision and follow the story onto a specified page according to the choice you’d made. “If you think Araya should head west to seek water, turn to page 27 or, if you think Araya should seek shelter in the village, turn to page 81.” He hated the randomness of the choices, you just had to take a chance and pick one. Jack had got stuck in the underwater forest for two whole weeks. Back and forth he went between pages 73 and 36, reading the same paragraphs over and over again.
He gets back into the lift with two young men. They have neat lines pressed into the front of their trousers and the one has little padlocks for cufflinks.
“Floor?”
“Basement” Jack says and puts his hands into his jeans pockets.
“It’s set in a newspaper,” says the one with the padlocks, “That’s why they’re filming it here. Scarlett Johansen is playing a journalist.”
“Playing a hot journalist!” interjects the other.
“She’s working under cover investigating something or other, and then she falls in love with the guy she’s writing about. So it’s like, does she stay being the undercover person and keep the guy and all that, or does she go back to being her boring old self, get the story etcetera?”
“Tell me she shags someone over the editor’s desk.”
“Oh yeah sure, that’s the one they’re filming on Saturday to see if it’s possible to get you to come in on the weekend.” They both laugh.
The lift pings its arrival on the third floor.
“Scarlett Johansen ready yourself, we are coming for you!” says the man with the padlocks, hoicking up his trousers.
The windows of the third floor are blacked out with curtains and huge lamps glare down on the far corner of the room. A microphone on a boom sways above the crowd of onlookers. One man has lifted his chair up onto his desk and is sitting, arms folded, watching. A woman carrying a stack of film cans gets into the lift; the red tape running round their sides says “URGENT: UN-DEVELOPED STOCK”. On top of the cans Jack can see a folded open copy of the script:
INT THE NEWSROOM - DAY
Julia is leaning on Paul’s desk. Her head is in her hands.
JULIA
Look Paul, I understand what you’re trying to say,
but I can’t.
Julia starts to cry.
JULIA
I’m just…. I can’t be that person anymore.
She gets out on ground and as the lift doors open once again in the basement, Jack depresses the close door button with a firm finger. He knows exactly who Scarlett Johansen is. Last Saturday night he rented “Girl with the Pearl Earring” from his local video store. The picture in the film, the model in the picture, the girl being the model, the actress being the girl, him watching the film and now the real woman, Scarlett Johansen, in his building. There’s a looping symmetry to it that appeals – like opening one of those Russian Dolls. And what’s more:
If Miss Johansen is not likely to be the type of woman to take the stairs
And If this is the only operational lift,
Then at some point, during the course of the day, she is going to get in it.
Else? There is no else; Jack is going to be waiting.
On the seventh floor someone steps up to the doors, and then seeing him standing there, takes a surprised step back. This is one of what Jack dubs ‘the turns’ – where the lift reaches one of the extremes of the building, and the expectation that he should alight is all the greater because there is nowhere else to go. He begins to explain that he is actually going back down and gives a small apologetic wave of his hand to cover the missing end of his sentence. After three or four of these incidents he perfects the gesture in lieu of any explanation. It involves a quick flick of the wrist that is both welcoming in a ‘No, no, its ok, get into the lift’ way and also directional in an ‘I’m going up’ or ‘I’m going down’ way. It’s astounding how many people immediately understand what he means. Of course he is not alone; thanks to the broken lift there are lots of other people who are going up to get down.
Two men in mid-conversation get in on the second floor, pausing only briefly. They barely notice Jack. The taller of the two is wearing a pale linen suits, its back lightly crumpled, as if he has been sitting down for too long. He talks rapidly and angrily, pointing at the shorter man’s chest:
“Thing is right, if you don’t do something about it, its cyclic; the whole process, repeats and repeats and repeats.” He stabs the syllables: “In perpetuity.” Jack thinks of a furious bee he’d watched on a bus slamming itself against the window. It would crawl slowly up the glass to the very rim where centimetres from fresh air, it would take flight and drop back down again to the base of the frame, and bang, bang, bang. He watched this loop over and over for the whole length of the bus journey. After he got off, he thought of the bus going round and round its route, with the bee inside going up and down the window. In perpetuity. Although of course the bee would die. Eventually.
The lift gets busier after noon as people head to lunch. Women scratch in their handbags, discussing where they will buy their sandwiches – “Pret or that little independent Turkish place on the corner?” Just after one o’clock it is so full that bodies are pressed uncomfortably against one another, and the doors open to disappointed faces on each floor that sigh and turn on their heels to take the stairs. Jack wedges himself into the back corner, crosses his arms over his chest.. Very few people speak until they’re out, snippets of their conversations drift back. “Suggested that he just give up. Best thing for it really. There’s nothing more I…” and “That’s what she says she wants but, honestly now, do you think it’s ethical?”
And then they are all back again after lunch, and no one comments on the fact that he is still there, though one woman, with a carrier bag of sandwiches, chewing on a soft drink straw, points a finger at him and smiles. She gets out on three.
Jack shifts his weight from one foot to the other, tugs down the hem of his T-Shirt. This could be it. The lights at the far end have been turned off and some of the black curtains pulled open, spilling daylight in. There’s a great heap of cables lying on the floor near the lift, and a woman just out of sight to the left is calling for water. But no one is waiting to get in.
As the doors start to ease closed a woman wearing a headset rushes towards him, her hand stuck out in front of her calling: “Hold the lift, please.” He doesn’t move and she has to repeat it – “Hold the doors!” Jack jabs frantically at the ‘three’. The lift yawn open again and he apologies. She frowns, puts a foot in the door, and beckons off to the right. Two men wheel over a large trolley-like piece of equipment; it has rubber wheels that creak over the metal lip of the lift. Jack is forced to step right back against the smoked-glass mirrors.
“Alright?”
Jack nods.
By four o’clock Jack is desperate to go to the toilet. He stands quietly legs crossed, jaw clenched as long as he can and then bursts out on five, where the bathrooms are directly opposite the lift. He hops as he pees. Two floors below Scarlett could be gliding down to her waiting limousine. He skids back, the bathroom door slamming behind him, leaves a wet fingerprint on the down button. A man waiting adjacent to him glances over and says: “Stairs might be quicker mate.”
Jessica is in the lift.
“Oh my God, Jack,” she says, eyes widening with delight, “Where the hell have you been? Did you have your meeting? Peter’s going mental.” She gestures on either side of her head with two rotating fingers. “He called the director and everything to find out what time you finished the meeting and where you were.” She is standing in his spot and so he’s stopped just inside the closing doors. On the back wall behind her, he can see the curious effect of too many mirrors in such a small space, the reflection of Jessica over and over, diminishing.
“Jack, are you ok?” she rubs the side of her nose, “That guy from the Arts Desk called again. He’s getting some sort of error message, wants you to call him back. I wrote it all down. It’s on your desk.” Jack watches her mouth opening and closing. “Are you going back to your desk now? What are you doing up here? Hey, did you know that Scarlett Johansen is filming on third?”
“Are you getting off?” says a woman on the 7th floor.
“Yes,” says Jessica.
“No,” says Jack.
She turns and waves goodbye.
This time when the doors open on the third floor there’s a group of people huddled around the lift, facing Jack. He untucks his hands from behind his back and crosses them firmly over his chest. One woman has a clipboard propped on her hip, next to her a tall man is swinging a roll of thick, silver tape around one finger. Standing in the middle, is the real Scarlett Johansen. She is lifting her sunglasses up towards her face, and for a very, very brief instant, he catches her eye over the top of the huge fly-lenses.
An assistant gets into the lift and walks towards Jack. She touches his arm and says in a honeyed American accent “Excuse me sir, I wonder if you could do us just the biggest favour? Miss Johansen, and,” she indicates the group of people waiting at the lift with a quick round circular motion over her shoulder, “well, there’s quite a few of us. Would you mind?” The doors begin to close and her arm darts out, a manicured red nail depresses the open button. She smiles at Jack: “Thanks so much, really, thanks.” The grip on his forearm tightens and he is directed out of the lift.
On the other side of the now deserted floor a man is rolling up a cable, wrapping it over his hooked thumb and down around his elbow, pausing to yank as the plug-end catches somewhere amongst the debris. The scene reminds Jack of the opening sequence of his all-time-favourite computer game, ‘Space Quest’: in which the character he plays, emerges from a lift to survey the spaceship, devastated by an explosion. Jack picks his way between some desks to reach the window; down below he can see a sleek black car waiting alongside the pavement. Progression to the next stage of the game requires a careful search through the mangled equipment and fallen aliens, typing in commands such as “Look in cupboard” or “Take rope ”. It took Jack weeks of careful logical deduction to work out the correct sequence in which to perform these actions, to find all the little objects he needed to unlock the way to next level.
From a table littered with tissues and ear buds, he picks up a small plastic box of brown eye shadow and rubs his finger onto silky surface of the colour. He flattens out a tissue with is palm, makes a fingerprint on it and is about to continue through the remaining fingers on his hand when he spots a small gold case. He clicks open the clasp and rolls the lipstick inside around with one finger before clicking it closed. The outside of the case is engraved “To SJ, My Darling”.
Jack takes the stairs two at time, swings round the banister on each level, the soles of his shoes clapping onto the linoleum floors. He leaps the last few steps, fringe flopping over his eyes and bursts through the foyer and revolving door. The entourage are gathered on the pavement alongside the black car. He calls out, “Miss Johansen, Miss Johansen,” waves with one hand and in the other upturned palm, holds out the lipstick case. Scarlett lifts her glasses and squints at him. With a gentle sweep of one hand she parts the group and walks back towards Jack, head tilted slightly to one side, her lips parted. He holds the lipstick case with two fingers, arm stretched out towards her like he is feeding an animal with sharp teeth. She turns the case over in her hand, looks back at Jack almost shyly and says, “Thank you.” She turns and begins to walk back to the waiting car.
“Can I ask you something?” Jack bursts out and she stops, looks at him over one shoulder.
“This is a, uh, a, a bit weird,” he begins. She adjusts the strap of her handbag, and then puts on her glasses and begins to walk away again. Jack has to raise his voice slightly: “I was just wondering whether you think it’s better to be yourself or to be, uh, someone else. To be what other people think you should be?” He hears the swish of the revolving door turning out someone else behind him, she looks back at him over one shoulder.
“Like is it better to be Scarlett or, uh, is it better to be Julia?”
“Julia? My character?”
Jack nods, hands hanging limply at his sides.
Scarlett pulls the glasses down onto the tip of her nose. “Julia isn’t real. Of course it’s better to be real than someone you’re not.”
Jack watches until the car pulls out and disappears off into the London traffic. He reaches into the back pocket of his jeans for the security pass that will let him back into the building and realises that he has left it on his desk.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
