Communion Town (25 page)

I sat down to hear what he was going to say. I remember how the kitchen counter’s light lined the edge of his face, showing the softness of his jaw.

In telling over again the story he told me, I can’t pretend to have the truth of it. I don’t know how he would really have acted with the others, or how they would have been towards him. Maybe, with them, he wasn’t the person I took him for. I can’t feel the texture of his experience, whether he was the darling of the group or a diffident novice, whether he was unsure of his footing or eager to please or barely interested at all, whether he had doubts about what they were doing. Or was the whole experience something different again, something I can’t begin to formulate? I can try and recount what he told me, but even that won’t come clear: it’ll change as I go, shifting out of true, because there’s never a way back to the telling before. We build ourselves into a concentric nest, each shell smaller, each opaquing the last. I can’t tell you what took place, I can only tell the story. So.

Every pleasure palls. In a short time Stephen had learnt to drink deep of experimental delights that would have frightened most of us if we understood them, but the richer the meal, the sooner the appetite wanes, and the epicurean longs for ever more esoteric flavours. He never saw himself as a sybarite; he thought of his explorations as light-hearted, even a kind of joke. But anyone can drift away from themselves when nothing is forbidden. Before he realised it the mask wouldn’t come off: he was corrupt with luxury, famished with feasting. The society knew how to watch for its moment. His mind and body were precise instruments for their own indulgence, but his imagination was sickly with exhaustion. He had fallen into the lassitude of one who has gone too far in the secret regions of experience, achieved too much in the sphere of private ambitions; now the tawdriness of the world was making him ill. His exquisite appetites troubled him more than ever but there was nothing, it seemed, that could answer any more to his needs. He was bored.

He had never wanted to despair. Quite the reverse. He had come to long above all for the gleam in other eyes which said: together we are about to try what would appal the ordinary world; we might even, who knows, startle ourselves. In everything he had done, it now seemed to him, all he had really wanted was that glimmer of unspoken agreement. Even in the gravest acts, there had been something unspoilt about what they did. They had been finding their way back to the green heart of the hedge maze where everything tended to the condition of innocence and the deepest depravity revealed itself as happy mischief. This search, he had come melancholically to accept, was the project of his life, but he feared he’d never again find that bad, blameless joy.

And then they came to him. Later, he would ask himself whether they had been guiding him from the beginning. I imagine it was those twins who made the proposition, coiling themselves one on either side and mentioning casually that there was something else he might find amusing. Something he would not have seen before. Not the kind of experience, he must understand, that would suit more ordinary tastes, and not the kind that it would be desirable for anyone else to know about, but one which some of the more open-minded experimentalists had found diverting. This was how they framed it. They felt they were libertines. If Mephistopheles had come to offer them the world, they would have curled their lips and continued their conversation, or that was the impression they were at pains to convey. Stephen doubted their notions but he credited their sense of style, and he could not turn down the chance of relieving his ennui.

There was a – well, it was a kind of private club, they told him. A society, dedicated to investigating certain potentials, shall we say, certain possibilities usually overlooked; investigating, and, naturally, delectating. Its experiments had been under way for a number of centuries, carried forward with ever more refinement by a handful of like-minded individuals in each generation. From their arch suggestions, it was difficult to work out exactly what they were offering. But it would have been unseemly to press for details, and what difference did it make, for wasn’t he capable of anything and desirous of every strange flavour the world could drop on his tongue?

Gradually he saw what, in their elaborately figurative way, they were hinting at. As it began to take on a shape, his instinct was to laugh: one of those soft, unassenting laughs, to dismiss the fun they were making of him. After teasing their story together by insinuation and omission, they left. He shook his head at the waste of his time, but the idea lingered and deepened, its impossibilities taking on subtlety and shading, so that he could not quite expel it. When we want, we give credence to unlikely tales.

And so Stephen was inducted. He travelled across the city at a specified hour of the night to an address far from his usual haunts, all the way out in Moebius Wall. He watched dubiously as the low streets of Glory Part and Three Liberties crawled past the taxi window; when he arrived he thought the driver must have mistaken the address. The house, a large suburban villa standing on a corner, was to all appearances derelict, surrounded by ramparts of weed and bramble, half-throttled by ivy and propped up on one side by scaffolding. A painted wooden board hung from the railings, warning that the building was unsafe. To Stephen the house appeared not only run-down but incomplete, as though it had fallen into long neglect before it had been finished. The night sky showed through the holes of the upper windows.

The iron gate, which was taller than he was and had layers of green paint cracking off like dead skin, had rusted into place on its hinges, half-open. He edged his way around it and pushed through the overgrowth. The house had no front door, only an aperture into which tendrils of ivy had wrapped themselves to reach along the ceiling. The hallway was defined by unhealthy orange light spilling through the house from the street behind.

Here it becomes difficult to keep hold of what happened to Stephen. What can I say that will bring us any closer to his experience in that house, that experience we are never going to grasp, but of which we can say that it was something, that
something
happened and he tried later to pass it on? It was the end of his association with the twins and their set. They avoided him after that night, evidently feeling he had let himself down rather badly. Perhaps he was not quite the right sort of person after all. His connections with that upper world seemed to go dead, but it made no difference to him now.

Stephen sat hollow-faced in my kitchen, his gaze flickering continually into the darkness of the living room. He asked for more coffee, emptied the fresh cup without waiting for it to cool and tried again to tell me. It was nothing, what had happened to him in that room, he said. It was all a fraud, a prank, that was obvious, but for some reason he couldn’t seem to shake off the effects.

Something had been waiting for him in the derelict house. He didn’t want to describe it, but it had been waiting in the front room, as dusty and motionless as if it had been standing there as long as the house itself. He might have mistaken it for some peculiar item of furniture except that it turned its head and stepped forward to greet him: it was very glad that he had come. It began to tell him a story. A minute later he was clawing himself away through syrupy space with his feet sliding on the boards as in a slow nightmare, and stumbling out into the streets of Moebius Wall feeling its fingernails catch on his sleeve.

Since that night he’d had no peace. It had taken him weeks to admit it to himself, but there was no doubt that it was following him. He saw it everywhere. It would be sitting along from him in the metro carriage, or would pass him on the November Bridge; or, when he paused by a flower stall on Vere Street, one of the customers would turn to him, and he would have to flee before it could open its mouth. When he walked home late he would hear the dragging footsteps behind him, drawing closer if he slackened his pace, never falling away.

He hated knowing that his equanimity could be shaken so easily, but how was he supposed to get anything done when he was always watching for the next glimpse of that unnatural figure? It was a frail thing, polite and even gentle in its manners, but insistent. It wanted to finish its story. At first it had only been on the streets, but before long it was following him indoors, into restaurants, into the office and eventually into his apartment. One morning he’d found it standing in the alcove in his hallway, dragging its white-nailed fingers down the wallpaper as if to say, If you did not want my story then you should not have listened. He felt the pressure of its need at all times. It wanted him to finish what he had started in the derelict house, but he was damned if he was going to do that. Something had been stripped away as he had listened to its voice: since that night he understood less about his own life. The tale it had half-told him had pared him to the quick so that if he let it say another word there would be nothing left of him at all. But it was his steadfast companion now, and it wanted acknowledgement.

He eyed the dark of the living room and then, with an effort, returned his attention to me. There was no getting away from it. He could only repeat how that depraved gang had torn from his eyes the blindfold which most of us wear to the end, and had shown him what waited there, beyond our rooms, after all the streets and houses, behind the world, outside the days. He believed he would have sought them out and murdered them one by one in judicious revenge if not for the apathy that had settled in his bones.

*  *  *

I haven’t seen Stephen since he told me his story. He left without making arrangements to meet again. Before he went, though, he did say one thing. He rose to go and as I prepared to say my goodbyes an afterthought appeared to strike him. He dipped his head from side to side, and gave me just the sort of smile I remembered from the old days. With the air of an indulgent elder brother, he said: Oh, all right, then. Yes. He knew what I was after and he would satisfy my curiosity. If I promised to listen carefully, he would tell me what he knew I wanted to hear. He would pass on the story that he had been told that night.

The corner of his mouth twitched as he waited for my response. I was touched. Both of us knew how much it meant, that offer. He had made it so casually you would have thought it hardly mattered to him at all, but I knew as well as he did that we had never before spoken so sincerely as we had tonight. For the first time in the years we’d known each other, he had confessed a need, offered to tell me a secret. He was finally willing to let me into the heart of the story.

Strip everything away, and that teaser’s smile would be the last piece of Stephen to go. I didn’t grudge him the attempt, but, as I gently turned down his offer, I didn’t feel too sorry for him either. No; as I guided him to the door, closed it behind him and watched from my window until his pale, unsteady figure had disappeared along the street, I preserved my envy and admiration exactly as they had always been. I preferred it like that, and besides, there was nothing else for me to do. How could I know enough to pity him?

The Rose Tree

A few of us were in the café that night. On this side of town there aren’t many places to go, so when we feel the need of a drink or some quiet company through the hours of darkness, we come here, where Dilks keeps serving till dawn. For as long as the season lasts, everyone knows that once dark has fallen you don’t go out again before morning.

The café must once have been a comfortable retreat. Dilks runs the place by himself, and he’s always there behind the counter, never misses a night. Behind him, the wall is lined with mirrors which must have been intended, once, to multiply gleaming ranks of bottles and scenes of busy communal life. But the glass is dulled over with black rust, and no reflections are visible: just a shadowy depth loitering.

He sells only rough spirit, served in scuffed water tumblers to the three or four of us you can usually find in here. We’re steady customers. We cluster in faint light which does not reach the farthest corners of the room. Orbs of creamy glass dangle on chains from the ceiling, but they’re cracked and cobweb-clogged, and only a few of them work at the best of times. When the electrics fail, we huddle closer still, and drink by the light of the storm lantern that Dilks hangs from a nail above the bar. We’ve got to know each other over time, and now and then we tell cautious stories about whatever it is has us living this way. The night yawns and we grow sluggish while the empty district waits out there with fog rolling down its walls.

I was in with Briggs and Baggott tonight. Dilks had set the electric fire beside our table, and we held our palms out to the glow. He stood watching us from behind his counter but we knew better than to invite him to join us for a drink. If you suggested anything like that, he’d roll his head to one side, abashed on your behalf, then scratch his beard and lumber off to rub at an old stain on the bartop. So we sat and sipped the neat spirit, making it last.

It was getting dark outside when we were roused by the hinge of the street door, and three men walked in. We didn’t know them. They looked with distaste at the wrecked fittings: at the upholstered seats that had rotted long ago in the side booths, the few warped tables and chairs that were left, and the cold inglenook fireplace which waited like a tunnel-mouth at the far end of the room, with its grate full of damp sticks of furniture and the mummified bodies of birds. Then they sat down and called for Dilks to bring them a bottle of whiskey. He was nonplussed for a minute, and I thought the novelty of the situation might have defeated him, but then he did as he was told, labouring his way around the counter with a bottle in one hand and three tumblers in the other. He even poured out a slug of spirit for each of the men.

Soon they were talking loudly among themselves and drinking fast. They seemed some way drunk already, but not in the way that we got drunk, bewildered and tired and sentimental. They drained their glasses and clicked them down on the table. They laughed often and hit each other in the shoulder for punctuation. Their hands and faces were well-kept and their manners of speech were not from around here. The one doing most of the talking couldn’t have been more than twenty-five or twenty-six years old. He was well-built, long-limbed, and dressed in good-quality gear: stout leather boots, navy jeans and a black reefer jacket. Once he pulled a leather-covered notebook from his bulky canvas satchel and consulted it, as if to remind himself of some point of fact. Brown curls framed his face, which was handsome in a boyish, rather delicate mode.

None of us regulars had much to say for ourselves this evening. We studied the tabletop. The great pale maps of mildew on the wallpaper glowed towards us through the room’s dusk. Rain came on outside, and water began to trickle from several points on the ceiling into the black ditches in the carpet, but Dilks didn’t seem to notice.

When it had been dark out there for an hour or so, the curly-haired young man emptied his glass and pushed his chair back.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said, addressing the room in general, ‘I have heard tales.’

Most of the bottle of whiskey was gone, but his speech was crisp.

‘They tell me that in this season, in your city, no one dares go out after dark.’

He tapped his notebook against the edge of the table.

‘Well, I’m going out. What’s there to see, I intend to see it with my own eyes. Whatever I meet out there, I’m going to shake it by the hand and listen carefully to what it has to say. I have a few questions to ask it.’

He looked pleased with this statement. We blinked and swallowed, and examined our empty glasses. One of the man’s friends murmured something. Another said, ‘Henry,’ and laid a hand on his arm, but he shook it off.

‘It’s nothing to be afraid of,’ he said.

We looked at each other, Briggs, Baggott and me. Eventually I cleared my throat and spoke up. ‘You can’t be going out there,’ I said.

The man stared at me, hard-eyed, then strode over, caught my hand and squeezed it.

‘My friend, your kind concern is noted. What I’m going to do is this. I’m going to walk out of that door and take a brisk stroll. Then at dawn my associates here will take me out for a slap-up breakfast, and I will regale them with the story of a pleasant night’s walk in the city and, I fully expect, an unusual adventure and an illuminating conversation.’

I would have tried again, but I had heard a feeble note in my voice, and I faltered. Baggott took over, sounding irritated with the whole lot of us. ‘You go out there, it’ll find you,’ he said, as if this were too plain to need saying.

‘With respect, friends,’ the young man said, ‘and much as I appreciate your advice, I prefer to see for myself.’ He stifled a belch. ‘Besides, haven’t I given my word to these gentlemen?’

His friends seemed to cast around for an answer. They didn’t find it, although one of them gave a dry laugh.

The curly-haired man pulled on a woollen watch cap, nodded to us, and opened the street door. Outside, it seemed to me, a congregation of disused premises leaned inwards in anticipation, leering down with their broken and boarded windows. He paused, turning up the collar of his jacket, and looked back at us.

‘Fine night,’ he said. ‘No one join me? No?’

He stepped out and the door moaned shut behind him. Through the window we saw him turn the corner of Halfmoon Street, heading towards the front of the station, his figure bobbing into the hem of a huge brown darkness.

It was time to get our glasses filled, but Dilks was busy scrubbing at something in his sink. The breath of cold air that had entered by the door dissipated, and the café grew tolerably warm again. We grew silent. The men at the other table had run out of conversation, too. Eventually one of them leant over to us.

‘We tried to talk him out of it,’ he said. His plump face was blotched pink and white. ‘We never encouraged him. But once he gets an idea in his head he won’t listen to anyone. We thought it was better than letting him go alone.’

We had no answer to that, but it was clear that now the newcomers wanted a parley. Baggott grumbled under his breath, but the pink-cheeked man grabbed the whiskey bottle and emptied the last of it into our glasses as he and his friend drew their chairs in closer.

‘I would have gone with him,’ he said, and paused uncomfortably. His eyes darted around, wanting our help. Then he shrugged and trailed off.

The electric fire glowed orange in the brown gloom, and with the whiskey in my gut it felt warm in here tonight. The wet smell of the carpet was in my nostrils. Baggott picked at his thumbnail. Briggs hawked and spat into his handkerchief. Dilks now stood with his gaze fixed on a curl of wallpaper that had, at some period in the past, peeled down to rest on the bartop.

The five of us were sitting in a circle around the table, our faces and hands hanging at the grubby edges of the pool of light. The rain had stopped, but rainwater still pattered into the floor. Above our heads the rest of the building was vacant. Briggs touched his pockets, then got up and crossed the dim space to the counter. He returned to his seat with two cigarettes, laid one on the table in front of him, and lit up the other. There was a silence. He sucked on his cigarette, held the smoke in his chest, then allowed it to overflow gently and roll in a bib down his front.

‘You want to know what happens when you stay out after dark?’ he asked. He leant forward and indicated Dilks with a guarded tilt of his head. The barman, who was ponderously counting pennies into his money box, showed no sign of interest in our talk.

‘He did it, once,’ Briggs said. ‘He never meant to, but he did. I’ll tell you what happened.

‘At the time, the café was nearly ready for its grand opening. The outside was freshly scrubbed and painted, very pretty. No one had seen the likes of it around here before, but Dilks was convinced this side of town was on the up and his establishment was going to be at the heart of it. To begin with I’d thought it was a foolish notion that would never work, but he was such a persuasive man in those days, such a man of energy and ideas, that I’d started to think he was going to prove me wrong. Whenever you spoke to him you felt you were living in exciting times, at the heart of it all, with good days to come. You came away wanting to work hard at some worthy project.

‘Of course, around here people kept to themselves, and they didn’t stay out after dark on those nights. But Dilks didn’t have any truck with that. He said it was nonsense. He said the district needed a place where we could all go for food and drink and warmth and fellowship. It’d be an inn where travellers could rest safely, he said, and a friendly hostel for tourists, it’d be a salon for talk and singing, and a tavern where locals would gather at the end of the working day; a feasting-hall, even, where every citizen would be welcome. When he talked about it like that, you believed him. You believed he and Poppy could make it happen.

‘They’d married that summer, Dilks and Poppy, and since then they’d been juggling the thousand tasks that come with starting a business – but, he used to say with a rueful grin, they hadn’t murdered each other yet. It had seemed impossible at first, conjuring a going concern out of a run-down building on this side of town, but each day they worked their plans nearer to realisation. They were up before dawn every morning. He was full of ideas, but she was the one with a head for figures. Together they’d done the research, put their plan together and got the investments they needed. Most nights they stayed up into the small hours working on the numbers at their kitchen table.

‘They were renting an attic room over in Three Liberties, a cramped, tiny place, with their bed in one corner and laundry strung up all around, chimney pots and slates right outside the window and the milk standing out on the sill. When I visited once, she joked about how she wasn’t going to fit in here for much longer. The child was just starting to show. Still, they’d only be there until the business got under way. I’m not one for family life, but when I visited the pair of them together I thought I could see the point.

‘And now the opening was in sight. Sometimes they felt the whole undertaking was like a ship held together by willpower alone, hurtling down the slipway while it was still full of leaks to be plugged, but now they glimpsed the day, not too far off, when it would float on even waters and they could navigate into the future. They’d cleared the planning permissions, bought licences for liquor and music and every kind of insurance, met all the regulations on safety and environmental health. The refurbishments were coming along nicely. Soon it’d be time to hire staff. Only the day before, Dilks had put up the sign with the name they’d chosen: The Rose Tree Café.

‘That night, he was working late on the premises, finishing off the paint job in the saloon. He’d intended to be home hours ago, but he and Poppy were used to these long days and late nights by now. They kept promising each other it wouldn’t be for much longer. He cleared up his night’s work, and briefly considered sleeping on one of the brand-new sofas in the lobby. The last metro had gone hours ago and he knew this was not the season to wander after dark. But he’d told Poppy he’d be home, and after all, he decided, it was only a half-hour’s walk across town. So he locked up the café and set out.

‘Much later I learnt what took place on that walk home.

‘The desertion gave a kind of intimacy to the streets, as if the city were one huge interior through which he alone had access. Strong moonlight painted everything with a grey-green pallor: the wet pavements, the trees branching like lungs and carrying the malignancies of birds’ nests, the high walls of the old houses, the frosted ceiling of cloud.