Dead Letters Anthology (33 page)

We both stared at the dirty water.

‘Shit,’ I said. ‘Sorry. That’s my fault.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said, turning her face to the window. In the neighbours’ kitchen across the way, a woman finished cleaning a saucepan and passed it to the man by her side, who took it off her and started to dry it. ‘They’re old glasses.’

‘But I seem to break one a week.’

‘Never mind.’

We both stood for a moment, as still as dummies, staring at the neighbours as they peacefully shared the washing-up.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about that picture. Or even ask you. I should have asked you, never mind told you.’

‘It’s not a big deal,’ she said.

I wanted to ask if it wasn’t a big deal why it had started to seem like it was.

* * *

On a bright, cloudless afternoon, I arrived by train at a small town in Surrey best known for its famous boarding school. Although I had never been there before and there was no immediate sign of the school outside the station, I started walking and just when I was starting to think I might have gone the wrong way, I rounded a bend and there on my left was a Victorian fantasia of Gothic towers, spires and gargoyles in light-hued sandstone that glowed with surprising warmth on a cold day.

A teacher from the English department, Mr Wakeling, met me and took me to the library and thence to a high-ceilinged room with dark wood panelling and tables arranged in a square. At three sides of this square sat two dozen smart-looking pupils who were perhaps 14 or 15. Mr Wakeling introduced me, reminding them that after the workshop they would need to gather in the Mary Olive Room, where he would be introducing the writers of the shortlisted entries in the ghost story competition that I had judged for the school and I would be announcing the winner.

After Mr Wakeling’s departure I asked the youngsters a few questions and discovered that two of the shortlisted writers were in the room, but that all would be present in the Mary Olive Room for the readings later. Once I had them working on an exercise, I opened my laptop. That morning I had been back on Ian’s novel, having had to work on other projects for a couple of weeks. I had reached the point where the narrator, Whitehead (we never learn his first name, only that it begins with R), confesses to having sexual fantasies about a teenager he sees at dog-training classes. I say ‘confesses’, but in Ian’s novel there’s no sense of confession about it. It’s just another detail in the narrator’s sordid and depressing life. Sordid and depressing in a way, but utterly compelling for the reader. This was the striking thing about Ian’s novel – the material was unpleasant, but you didn’t want to stop reading, partly, perhaps, because of the absence of a moral dimension.

I had made a note to ask Ian if he wanted to specify the age of the teenager, to make it at least legal, were the narrator to have sex with her, but as I went on I realised that he wanted it to be uncertain. The uncertainty was part of it.

I looked up from my screen at the pupils in the room. A mix of boys and girls, they were about the age I imagined the teenager in Ian’s novel to be.

When you attend conventions for writers and editors and agents and illustrators – and fans – and you sit on a panel discussing topics from the world of literature, one question crops up with predictable regularity: ‘Is there anything you wouldn’t write?’ As in – are there any taboos? What is taboo for you? For me the suggestion of sex with kids is somewhere I wouldn’t go as a writer, but for some reason I had been quite happy to go there as an editor.

Noticing that most of the young people around the room had stopped writing, I announced that there were just two minutes remaining and then we would move on to the next part of the exercise.

* * *

The Mary Olive Room was an intimate space in dark wood, with two baronial-style high-backed wooden chairs (I was invited to sit in one) facing several rows of folding chairs. These were occupied by boys, girls and members of staff, more of whom stood at the back and along the sides. This was the kind of event that, when I had been starting out, would have had me on edge for days prior to its taking place.

Having noticed that five of the shortlisted entrants were Year 9 boys and one was a Year 13 girl, I had suggested to Mr Wakeling that it might be an idea to give two prizes, since one would expect a seventeen-year-old girl to write better than boys four years her junior. In the event we gave a prize for the most effective ghost story and a prize for the most original story. I talked about all the stories and heard myself going on and on, as I invariably do, going into too much detail, getting sidetracked, looping back on myself, making little jokes that didn’t quite come off, which staff laughed at out of politeness. I even heard myself start to talk, for some tangential reason, about Ian’s novel, and as I did I realised I hadn’t yet taken care of one of the most important jobs in the whole process, which was to find someone to do a cover quote. I didn’t know what made me think of that at that moment, but think of it I did. I moved the subject back to more relevant matters and, probably rather abruptly after such a rambling speech, wound things up.

The event was over. The librarian offered to drop me off at the station and I accepted. It was an extremely cold evening and I wanted to get back to London as soon as possible, raising the likelihood of a late dinner with Jane.

As I stepped on to the station and started walking towards the subway that would take me to the platform from where the London train would depart I felt a vibration in my pocket. I reached for my phone and saw that I was being called by Steve, a close friend, with whom I would normally communicate by email or text, so I was surprised, but I didn’t immediately think of bad news. I answered the call and Steve said hello and asked how I was and then asked if I had heard about Joe. He hadn’t wanted me to hear about it on Facebook, he said.

I thought later about the difficulty Steve must have faced making that call and perhaps other similar ones to other mutual friends. At what stage would he have said what it was he had called to say? Whenever he said it, it would have been too early in the conversation. It was such an absurd thing to say, delaying by another two or three sentences would not have made it more reasonable, would not have lessened in any way the effect of it.
Joe is dead
. Was that what he said? Probably not. Certainly not.
Joe died
. More likely. It seems to suggest some agency of Joe’s. He wasn’t just dead; he died. It’s OK.
Joe died last night
. Or:
Joe died in the night
. No, he was telling me this in the evening of the following day.
In the night
wouldn’t have made sense. The night had been too long gone.
Joe died in the night last night
. Too many nights. Keep it simple.
Joe died last night
.
Joe died
. Maybe, after all:
Joe is dead
.

How do you end a call like that? How do you have the balls to make it in the first place? Do you have all the necessary information? You call someone and tell them that, they’re going to be thrown by what you tell them. They’re going to ask questions. You’re going to be expected to have answers.

I walked around the platform in tight little circles as I asked Steve the questions to which he had no answers. I told him when I’d last seen Joe and he told me when he had last seen him. We talked about strokes, heart attacks, sudden death syndrome. Neither of us mentioned suicide, not because we didn’t have the guts, but because we both knew, we just knew, it wasn’t, it couldn’t be, the truth. At some point during the conversation I checked the train times on a screen above my head and saw that I had fifteen minutes before the next train to London. Enough time to conclude this call, surely? Did I really think that? I knew I didn’t want to have this conversation on a train. I knew also that I wanted to stay on this platform – the wrong platform – until the call was over, in case entering the subway caused me to lose the signal.

Somehow we did end the call and I walked towards the subway. I still had five minutes before the train. Joe had sometimes written about trains and stations. He had never driven, so he had relied on trains. Tube trains, the Overground, suburban lines. As I started walking down the steps to the subway that would take me under the tracks, I noticed the details of the wall ahead of me at the bottom of the steps. Something compelled me to study the wall, as if it held a clue to how I felt at that moment, as if it would help me to make sense of what I had been told. The colours – silver, orange, white, green – and textures both dry and damp. The white wall and the patches of green moss and mould. The rust-coloured traces of running water. The orange hand rails, which matched the frame surrounding a fish-eye mirror mounted in the corner, a useful view of which was denied to anyone descending the steps, such as myself, by a strange electrical box attached to the adjacent wall. The single grey cable running out of the top of this box and into a steel cable concealer that ran across the top of the two adjacent walls, then turned through ninety degrees to drop vertically until it reached a level where it could turn through ninety degrees again and run into the section of the subway that passed under the tracks.

Go ahead. Skim. I’m just telling you what I saw. It might be important. It might not.

I hurried through this part of the subway, dodging the water that dripped from the ceiling. The walls were spoilt in many places, render coming away in leprous patches as if something was trying to force a way through. When I reached the other end and climbed the steps to the platform, the train was arriving. I waited for it to come to a stop. The doors opened to let passengers off. I boarded and walked through to the end of the carriage. I looked at the narrow shape made by the interconnecting passageway, the width of a man, and I had a sudden flickering image of Joe standing in that frame with his back to me, like the view I’d had of him leaving Jane’s front room a few short weeks earlier. I hadn’t seen him since. I hadn’t even spoken to him on the phone. Had we emailed? I wasn’t sure. Was it possible he had emailed me and I hadn’t replied? It was possible. I found a seat and took out my phone and accessed my mail, trying to find the last email I had received from Joe, but I often had difficulty finding particular emails on my phone. I tried the sent box to see if I could find the last one from me to him, but I couldn’t find any of those either, and within a couple of minutes of pulling out of the station my signal had vanished. Either I turned my face towards the window and saw myself staring in at me from the country dark or I looked forward to the narrow frame of the interconnecting passageway. I didn’t want to look forward to that. I
didn’t
look forward to that. The shape of it. The narrowness. When the signal returned I texted Jane and at Waterloo she was there to meet me. We went to a restaurant close by where we had had good times, but for all the kindness she showed me and the support she offered me it didn’t feel right. I didn’t know what we were supposed to do or how I was supposed to act.

I tried to avoid Facebook for the first two days and work solidly on my editing of Ian’s novel. I was behind anyway. The publisher needed the manuscript for typesetting in a few days and I was still on chapter two of my second go round. His chapters were quite long and I had no notes on the first two chapters from my first reading. That was my excuse. Plus, although I was steering clear of the Internet, I checked emails as they came in and I answered any about Joe, including one from the editor of a magazine, who asked me to write a piece about him. The fact was I wanted to know what had happened. We all did, all Joe’s friends.

Towards midday I headed out to get something for lunch. At Dalston Kingsland I considered my options, detecting a whiff of something sweet and hot from the market across the road. As I was crossing at the lights, the turn of a head caught my eye. Razored back and sides, pronounced overhang of the back of the skull. He disappeared into the market and I changed direction without checking to see if anything was coming. A bike swerved around me, its rider trying to blow his whistle at the same time as giving me a mouthful of abuse. By the time I looked back towards the market, Joe had disappeared.

I went in the shopping centre and entered the supermarket and immediately forgot what I had gone in for, so I wandered, waiting for it to come back to me. I ended up, like Freud’s man in a strange city always winding up in the red light district, in the tinned soup aisle.

Back at Jane’s, I opened the front door and stepped on the post. I picked it up without checking the envelopes and dropped it all in the recycling box. In the kitchen I emptied a can of Heinz Vegetable Soup into a saucepan, adding black pepper and Worcester sauce and chilli flakes and curry powder as it cooked. I poured the soup into a bowl, dumped the pan in the sink and ate at my desk while staring at Ian’s novel and thinking about Joe. Those thoughts just kept coming back to the same one: that it didn’t make sense, it wasn’t actually believable, it was too baffling. Maybe that’s three thoughts, but they all felt like one to me. It was as if life was a story and the author had fucked up with a plotline that didn’t quite work, that prevented the suspension of disbelief.

Halfway through the afternoon I emailed Ian. A puzzle I had enjoyed on my first pass through the novel, but hadn’t tried too hard to figure out, now seemed to need addressing. I had hoped that on my second reading I would decide the mystery could remain unsolved. An espionage subplot revolved around a fake map-making company called Geographia that operated out of several addresses up and down Fleet Street.

Geographia was a real company
, I wrote to him.
It actually did have offices, at various times, at numbers 55, 63, 111 and 167 Fleet Street. I’m not sure I understand why – or how – you’re using this stuff. Is it important?

I sent the email before I could delete it. I could imagine Ian objecting to it, perhaps just to the last question, to the use of the word ‘important’.