Communion Town (26 page)

‘He first caught sight of the figure as he passed an abandoned warehouse. It was some distance away, picking its way across the weeds and concrete of an empty lot. It moved with a curious, broken gait, stooped over as if it might be in distress, and Dilks paused. He almost called out to ask whether he could help; but he hesitated, and said nothing. The figure’s face was blank with shadow, but it gave the impression of gazing directly at him. He walked on.

‘A few minutes later he knew that it was following. When he stopped to listen, he could hear an irregular footfall, like someone waltzing drunkenly and alone through the alleys. He redoubled his pace, but when he glanced over his shoulder a slender pale shape was moving in the ashy-green darkness. There could be no doubt now of what was close behind him. But what could he do except keep walking, hoping that he would find himself suddenly at home and that this walk, which seemed as though it might last forever, would dissolve as though it had never happened in the brightness of their room?

‘He didn’t glance back a second time. But the odd, slow footsteps, somehow more suggestive of three legs than of two, kept drawing nearer, and soon he knew that it was treading on his heels. He knew that, if it liked, it could have laid its fingers on his shoulder. At the idea his legs weakened and he staggered into a doorway for support.

‘Turning, he found himself facing it. He was never able afterwards to describe what it looked like. He could only say that he pitied it a great deal. It stood there for a long moment, as if it needed help but couldn’t bring itself to ask. Then it leant up to him, closer, until it was only inches from his averted face, and, softly, it began to speak.

‘It told him a secret. A story about itself, that was what it told him. Later, the details of what had been said escaped him completely. All he could remember was wishing desperately not to hear, and knowing that nevertheless the words were slipping into his ears, soaking down deep, never to be recovered.

‘At last it drifted glumly away. He thought that, before it went, it reached out and brushed his shoulder affectionately, or plucked away something small – a loose thread from his coat. The encounter had lasted minutes at most.

‘He was shaken, but he pulled himself together and made it home. As he climbed the stairs he found that he was bright-eyed, light on his feet, fingers twitching. That story had trickled down like rainwater, out of reach. He had already forgotten what it was he had heard. He was ready for a strong restorative. He was excited, if the truth be told. Certainly it had been a peculiar incident, but he couldn’t wait to tell Poppy. Once he talked it over with her, he knew, that meeting would become the well-shaped tale of a night’s minor misadventure, seriocomic, perhaps mock-heroic: telling it over between them, they’d settle what it meant. It would become an amusing demonstration of how even the most hard-headed of us were prey to strange frights when out late in lonely places, and of how all those stories about this side of town were laughably exaggerated. She’d be asleep by now. He wondered if he should wake her, so that he could tell her tonight.

‘He put his key to the latch. It didn’t seem to fit. He tried again, but it refused to go in. He examined the key, but it didn’t appear to be damaged, and the lock, too, looked the same as ever. Eventually he knocked on the door, and, as it opened to Poppy’s sleep-fuddled face, he stepped forward, offering an apologetic embrace.

‘But Poppy didn’t move into his outstretched arms. Instead, her sleepy eyes snapped wide and she shrank away in sudden panic. She tried to force the door shut on him, but he was already inside the flat, and seeing that he was now halted with confusion and was not to be expelled, she retreated to the far side of the cramped attic with one hand pressed to her belly and the other feeling blind across the countertop of their tiny kitchen. She stared at him with no trace of recognition in her face. Her voice shook as she asked what he was doing in her home.

‘It seemed to Dilks that he had missed a step between sleeping and waking, and had slipped into a bad dream. He had never seen such expressions on her face before. He tried to speak calmly in spite of the hysteria that all at once had a hold of his innards. She was backed hard against the counter, edging along towards the cutlery drawer. She thought he was an intruder. He wanted to shout till his lungs were ragged that she was wrong – that, if this city were a thousand cities, there would still be none in which the two of them were strangers.

‘He reminded her who he was and where they were, and took a cautious step towards her. She kept still, but her eyes danced, mad to get out. He took another step towards her and she shrieked, clawed the drawer open and snatched out a carving knife. He raised his hands carefully, but when she shrieked a second time and slashed at him, he found himself grabbing one of their cheap wooden chairs by the back and swinging it to keep her off. She screamed at him to get out, get out, get out of her home.

‘Well, they went at each other for a long while, that night, screaming and yelling all round the room with the carving knife and the smashed-up chair. The neighbours must have had to bury their heads under their pillows. There wasn’t much left of the flat by the time they’d finished. But at last he tottered out to the street in the first shade of dawn. There was nothing more to say, no argument left to have with this woman who claimed that he was a lunatic and that she’d never seen him before he forced himself through her front door. So he made his way back to his unfinished café, let himself in, and poured himself a drink with a jumping hand. And he’s been here ever since.’

The five of us shifted in our seats. Dilks, slumped in his usual position, watching a puddle of rainwater quiver sluggishly larger on the bartop, didn’t seem to have heard anything of what had been said. Briggs lit his second cigarette, took a drag, and rested his hand on the table. A scribble of bluish smoke climbed from his fingers. I looked over at the windows, which by now were streaked with condensation.

‘But they say it takes everyone differently,’ Briggs said. ‘Who knows. Perhaps your friend will have no trouble.’

Something hit the window. We saw the flattened palm of a hand. It lifted away, then slapped the glass again. We all sat uselessly for a moment. Then one of the newcomers leapt up and wrenched the street door open. There was a red mark on the windowpane.

We were all on our feet. The young man came in unsteadily, with his jacket hanging open, confused. His mouth worked dumbly. Then his legs gave way and he fell against the wall, one of his arms twitching. The two young men caught him before he could collapse, and led him to a chair. One arm of his jacket was ripped and the blood was sticky on his hand, but examination revealed only a dirty, shallow graze on his palm and forearm, as if he had fallen on tarmac. We couldn’t work out where all the blood had come from.

His lips trembled and great shivers went through his limbs. He didn’t seem to know where he was. Something had changed about his eyes, leaving them incredulous and emptied-out. He looked to me like someone who had lived a century in a single night, or travelled impossible distances without meeting another living soul.

But we held whiskey to his lips and by degrees his breathing steadied. It took us a long time to calm him down and get him to focus on his surroundings instead of some awful imaginary prospect, but after a while he was able to clasp the tumbler in his hands. One of his friends said his name and, tongue-tied, with downcast eyes, he nodded. Eventually he raised his head. He drew a long, uneven breath, like a man recovering from a fit of sobbing, and we gathered around him, close, as if we wanted to keep inside the circumference of the light, weak as it was.

And then someone asked: ‘What happened to you?’

Slowly at first, in broken words and phrases, he began to tell.

A Way to Leave

Simon knelt with his body locked from groin to throat until the muscles opened and he succeeded in pouring out a caustic mixture of liquid and gas. When he could breathe again he flushed away the waste, rinsed his mouth and stood in front of the mirror, trying to decide whether the pain had lessened. The left side of his head throbbed from the eye-socket to the roots of the teeth. His migraines had been getting worse, forcing him to spend whole days lying half-awake in the darkened bedroom. In his dream Florence had murdered him but everyone had agreed that he was to blame. He scooped more water into his mouth and spat. From the silence downstairs he could tell that she was sitting in the parlour, listening out, waiting for him to appear. He studied his thin arms and the hollow of his chest. Isolated raindrops broke on the bathroom window and wet light came and went with the sway of the branches outside. It was the Flâneur’s season now, without a doubt: tonight, no one with a choice would be found in the streets after dark. But Simon was not going to waver. The reflection granted a nod of approval. The migraine didn’t matter; nor did Florence. By tomorrow none of these things would remain to trouble him. He believed that all of this would be changed.

He held his breath as he left the bathroom, but in the corridor a floorboard squealed underfoot. It made no difference. Florence would not let him escape the house unremarked. She had been in good form all summer, going out in the afternoons to visit galleries or see films, then coming home to fuss over her cats, but now that the season had turned she was showing indications of a decline. Her transitional moods were difficult for him: she stopped going out – neglecting even the short daily walks on the heath which she claimed were so crucial – and took to watching his every move around the house as if she knew he was plotting a betrayal.

Along the corridor he passed junk-crammed rooms with their curtains sagging half open. The sheets draped over the furniture made it seem that the upper floors were being colonised by giant mushrooms, but Florence continually put off sorting things out. She worried that she couldn’t afford to keep the house, or alternatively to get rid of it, but she could never seem to gather the energy to discover which was the case. Ectarine Walk was one of those placid avenues which recede into the heart of Lizavet, lined with iron railings and elm trees reaching higher than the rooftops. Well-fed tabbies watched from behind bay windows. ‘Salubrious’ was how she liked to describe the street, in a tone of dry scorn that made Simon feel she had learned the word from some disagreeable ancestor. The townhouses seemed so solid and flush, so complacent in their presence, that he wanted to insult them with some glaring unreality, and he often fantasised that by walking on past Florence’s house and turning a corner or two, you might discover the knotted navel of the world, with paving stone and tree trunk and space itself twisting impossibly and plunging out of sight. Such a thing, he felt, must be required as compensation.

In the bedroom he put on the first T-shirt he found in the bottom of the wardrobe and took his jacket from the bedpost. The vigilant silence continued downstairs. She could hear him getting ready but she sat tight-lipped in the parlour. The old grey cat yowled pitifully at him as he crossed to the head of the stairs. It did this all the time now, as though it needed to communicate some appalling realisation. The vet had said more than once that it was feeling its age and could only decline, but Florence, refusing to understand what she was told, really seemed to believe that with the right pills it would stop making that distressing noise and be again the contented kitten she had grown up with. It limped after Simon for a couple of steps before drawing back to its place by the bannisters.

He had first seen Florence at the city library, the one and only time he had been there. He should have known better, even then, but he had gone in the hope that the place might supply the kind of information he needed. The security guard at the turnstile eyed him and made him leave his bag in a locker by the front desk, and after that he didn’t dare approach the librarians behind their beechwood counters: he could picture their faces as he tried to explain what he wanted to know. Instead, he wandered the open shelves without finding anything, and toiled up and down the gloomy cylinder of the main stairwell while rain surged across the circular skylight far above. Later he sat at one of the catalogue terminals and tapped the keyboard, but a panel flashed up on the screen requiring him to identify himself. As he pushed the chair back its rubber heels screeched, causing students to look up from their books and old men to lower their newspapers.

He was trying angrily to get the locker open so that he could go when a woman came in, fumbling with a flower-patterned umbrella, shedding droplets and pushing hair out of her face. Her pastel raincoat was so outmoded that she looked at first glance like an elderly lady, but he saw that she was around his own age. He watched with interest as she tried to hold her umbrella under one arm and search in her bag, while at the same time unsticking the soaked hem of her cotton dress from her legs. Then, as she crossed the entrance hall, the string of her necklace somehow snapped and tiny beads poured across the flagstones – it was the same sound he had heard that morning when rain began to fall into the park. She grabbed at the middle of her chest and gasped as though she had been drenched.

There was an opportunity here, of course, if he were to step forward and help her collect the beads, joking, making light of the accident; but he found he preferred the scene as it was. He stayed quite still as she knelt down, her hair dropping into her face and the umbrella falling away from her with a clatter.

After following her up the stairs at a safe distance he loitered among the shelves of the art history section, watching her take a book down and leaf through the stiff pages. At the end of the aisle a notice listed the contents of the room. He picked out a name he thought sounded familiar and browsed along the shelf until he was beside her.

‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘This artist, Albert Gaunt? Do you know, where would I …?’

Only a little alarmed, she showed him where to find the books. He thanked her in a warm undertone and touched her elbow for an instant. She looked up and down the aisle, then told him that Gaunt was one of her favourites. He said, his too. Someone further along the shelves exhaled disapprovingly. Simon caught her eye and made a mischievous face.

At that first meeting it had taken him a few minutes to grow restless in her company. He had watched her trying to conceal how nervous he made her. It had been obvious that he would always be able to predict what she was going to say and do, and yet when she had mentioned an exhibition on Gaunt’s printmaking at one of the galleries in town he had suggested that they go together. He could not have explained why, but as soon as he had seen Florence he had known that he was going to speak to her about his aspiration.

It had been a long time since he had tried confessing to anybody what he wanted. It never went well. They didn’t understand when he told them that the aspiration had been folded inside him long before he could put a name to it, and that he had spent years pretending he was like everyone else, years in which no plan worked out for him and he started getting migraines which left him blind and speechless. They always got the same look on their faces, as if they thought he’d made a joke so tasteless they could not have heard it right. For most people, what he wanted was just about the worst fate they could imagine. As a desire they found it unthinkable; their skin crawled. It wasn’t even real, the Flâneur – it was just some folklore nightmare, some hallucination generated by the city. Why would you dream of seeking it out? That ancient, lonely thing, wandering the city forever in search of someone to whom it could speak its tale. No one knew what that story was, or what happened to those who heard it, but everyone knew that if you listened you were lost. You would never be the same again.

Weeks after the library, he and Florence had spent a bleak afternoon walking around Lizavet Heath while he tried to explain himself. As they skirted the pond, exposed between the damp dish of the heath and a low winter sky, she kept her overcoat wrapped around her small body and her gaze fixed on the rooftops, but she listened as he told her what his aspiration meant. He did his best to put it in terms she would find appealing. He said:

‘We’re always telling ourselves the story of ourselves, every waking moment, as if nothing matters more. Isn’t that a selfish way to live? Shouldn’t we try and get outside that?’

He knew he was doing himself an injustice by phrasing it that way, but it was as close as he could manage. He wanted to tell her: the beauty of this broke my heart at sixteen and it still hasn’t finished breaking. But she turned her face to the grey disc of the water. She couldn’t understand why he would want to do something like that to himself, she told him, and she didn’t want to talk about it any more. Walking away, she said: ‘You sound as though you don’t want to be here at all.’

He thought that would be the end of it with Florence. As she moved past and left him standing by the pond, he was at a loss to understand why he had even tried. And yet when he left the heath she was waiting for him at the gate; she took his hand and asked him to walk her back to the house, and when they reached the three steep stone steps that led up to her front door she said she was going to take him out to dinner. She telephoned to make reservations at a restaurant on the Mile.

Later they walked through the Esplanade as the daylight failed. Simon offered his elbow and Florence folded her arm through it, taller than him in her heels. He was wearing a high-collared overcoat that she had found for him in one of her upstairs rooms, and he felt old-fashioned and graceful strolling among the carnation sellers with pigeons fussing around their feet. In the restaurant, a tiny underground place with three foreign waitresses who tended to them approvingly, they drank a whole bottle of red wine and found themselves talking a good deal. They did not mention his aspiration. She took him home in a taxi, led him up the steps of the house and pinioned him in the bed. Her mouth tasted of tannin and to his surprise they were not disappointed.

Thirst woke him early the next morning, with Florence curled towards him in the sheets sleeping deeply and giving off a powerful warmth. The room was bright because they had not closed the curtains, and he watched as a magpie arrived on the windowsill, snatched some morsel and leaped out of sight. For a while he lay there and tried to gauge the severity of his headache.

Ignoring the grey cat’s keening, he went down to the hall, the timbers of the staircase popping under his feet. His migraine had not subsided. It was a sinuous thing which now opened its poisoned veils all through his head, now shrank into a pebble in his eyeball. No one could have blamed Simon if he’d gone back into the bedroom, drawn the curtains and given up on the day, but he refused to admit defeat. The season was here and his aspiration was within reach.

In the parlour Florence sat curled on the sofa, holding the black-and-white kitten against her chest. Her forearms were goosefleshed and her hair hung as if she had just dried it with a towel. She had been listening to music, it seemed, and a record still turned on the gramophone, the needle popping and crackling along the rim. Simon hated the corroded brass horn: its gross organic shape sprouting in the corner was so obsolete it was beyond ridiculous. It was like living with his grandmother, but along with everything else, Florence had inherited a superb vinyl collection – opera and lieder, piano concertos and string quartets – and she would never be able to give that up and start her own.

As Simon hesitated in the parlour doorway, torn between saying something and pressing on for the front door, the kitten wriggled free, dodged around his feet and sprinted upstairs. The fat ginger cat lifted its head and projected a perfect lack of interest from its copper-green eyes. The record crackled on. Florence took a cushion and drew her knees up around it, retreating deeper into the sofa, and Simon suppressed an impulse to cross the room and kick over the side table. All of this might have been planned specifically to prevent him from leaving. He wanted to ask if it was so hard for her to summon a couple of words or just a smile of assent; but she had never once given him that. He wasn’t sure she would even recognise the idea. He marvelled, not for the first time, at how neatly she could put him in the wrong.

The elderly animal wailed from upstairs. Florence flinched, and Simon knew what she was thinking: the poor thing was suffering and she didn’t know what to do, it couldn’t clean itself any more, could barely eat without help; maybe she should ask the vet again; it was all too much to cope with. He saw these anxieties swell through her mind, then ebb as she returned to the main task of denying him any scrap of approval, of permission, before he left. His eye was a lump of gristle implanted in his head but he paid it no attention.