Glass (3 page)

One day, on my way back from the cathedral, I wandered past a primary school. I stopped by the tessellated diamonds of the fence to watch them play. The children were effortlessly happy, albeit in a volatile, slightly primal way. They were playing near a drain, which was overflowing with scummy water. To an adult, this was distasteful, but to a child it was Lucerne by moonlight, it was anything and everything. A boy ran up in his scuffed Velcro-fastened shoes and booted the water as if it were a football. It sprayed a nearby group of girls who squealed and shivered with mingled terror and delight, and the fattest girl – the enforcer – ran after the boy. Screams sailed into the air as they sprinted off towards the other end of the playground.

My thoughts were interrupted by a call from my boss, Mickey.

‘Günter, you have to come back to the depot.'

‘But I've delivered all the milk.'

‘I know.'

‘Have I left something behind?'

I heard the boss sigh.

‘Let's say yeah. Would you be so good as to waddle down?'

‘I'll be there in half an hour.'

I walked back to the depot, and found Mickey behind the same car-boot-sale desk he was always at. He leant back on two legs of the chair with his hands on his round, taut belly, the cold halogen strip lighting gleaming off his bald pate.

‘So what did I leave behind, Mickey?'

He leant forwards and his chair hit the floor as he picked up a plain white envelope.

‘This.'

It was a cheque.

‘I'm sorry, Günter. You're a good lad but this is an old man's game. We're gonna have to let you go.'

‘You're firing me?'

‘Redundancy, yeah. People don't want their milk delivered in this day and age; they want to order it off their phones and have it delivered to their work address, they want long-life that lasts a year because they're never home—'

‘Please, Mickey. You don't have to explain.' I shook my head bitterly. ‘I've seen the rows of UHT in the supermarkets, they're taking over. I understand. But this is a very large cheque. Are you quite sure I qualify for this kind of severance pay?'

‘Are you fucking crazy?' he asked me.

I thought for a moment.

‘No.'

‘Then keep the cheque. I'm not gonna tell anyone.'

‘Does that mean I'm not supposed to have it?'

He rolled his eyes.

‘Just do us a favour and leave, okay?'

On my way out, I took a bottle with me and peeled back the cap, sitting on a wall by the loading bay. I drank it dry and watched the sunlight play through the misty white glass. I wondered how the bottles looked when they were clean. Probably beautiful in the thankless way of everyday things.
¹⁴

The next day I went to a recruitment centre in town. Everything was blue or grey, and after I filled out a clipboard's worth of information, they took me through to a little room with a sofa made out of two seating blocks pushed together, and a little plastic plant. I sat down with a recruitment lady and we talked over my skills – attention to detail, honesty and integrity, neatness, good with hands. She asked me if I'd ever considered a career in recruitment.

‘No, I hadn't. Isn't that what you do?'

‘Yes. A role has just come up. Not mine.' She tittered.

‘So, if I did it, I would be recruiting people for jobs?'

‘That's right.'

‘And if I were in your shoes, would I be offering people jobs in recruitment?'

She looked less certain about this.

‘I suppose I'm asking a two-part question,' I said. ‘Is it a pyramid scheme, and if so, what will we do when everyone works in recruitment?'

‘I can't really say. Shall I put you down as “quite interested” for that one?'

I said that that would be fine, and left.

5

Church Attendance

On the day of the funeral, Dad, Max, and I stood in the lounge not talking. I was so nervous I felt cold. Relatives and ex-colleagues started to trickle in, some wearing hats. When there were enough of us, we followed the funeral director, Ivan, who, despite his hunch, looked almost inhumanly tall in his hat, as various relatives put magnetic flags on the roofs of their cars. Dad, Max and I got in the hearse, which followed Ivan at walking pace to the end of the road, trailed by the other cars in a giant parti-coloured snake. Ivan got in and we proceeded through Salisbury, slowing traffic. White-van men let us out at roundabouts. Our line was broken once, by a BMW driver. I forced myself to assume that he hadn't realised what he was doing.

We arrived at the cathedral. When we had booked the venue, it had felt like a gesture of profound love for my mother, but now it suddenly seemed overblown and ridiculous. There were about forty of us, and the building could probably seat ten times that number. It was gargantuan. One of the life-sized statues built into the wall was holding his own model cathedral.
¹⁵
Each of the building's hundreds of arches were built into further, larger arches, spires multiplying on the spires, all pointing up. The huge central spire not only pointed up but seemed to be grasping at something beyond the sky. I thought I saw the very tip of it flash red.

People kept looking at us with dramatically turned-down mouths as the coffin was unloaded. Some of them came up to say they were sorry for my loss, as if it was really no loss to them, and they had only come out of politeness. I probably looked thoughtful, or mildly affronted, as I thanked them, but I was mourning too far below the surface to put up much of an appearance of mourning.

The nave was even larger than I had anticipated as we followed the coffin inside and our small band huddled up in the front rows, the majority behind them empty. A choir was singing a song I didn't know. We were asked to sing a hymn, and very few people sang along properly, perhaps not knowing the tune, perhaps feeling that this wasn't the occasion for an enthusiastic performance. We were asked to pray and I didn't say ‘Amen', and I felt bad because almost no one did. A woman decked in long robes at the lectern, or whatever it was called, introduced herself as the Very Reverend Dean Angela Winterbottom.

‘“So they poured out for the men to eat,”' she began. ‘“And it came to pass, as they were eating of the pottage, that they cried out, and said, O thou man of God, there is death in the pot. And they could not eat thereof.”
¹⁶
Unfortunately, Mathilda's story is as old as stories themselves. So much has changed since the writing of the Bible, and yet, even in our technologically enhanced age, we still find ourselves afflicted in the most basic ways, and the same things continue to matter to us: our search for family, for friends, for work and for meaning in God. We may have every right to feel that Mathilda was taken from us before she should have been, but seeing you all here today, it's clear that she made a lasting impact in this world.'

The Dean kept indicating the coffin as if my mother might somehow have a right of reply, or as if she was some bottled genie who might at any moment jump out to verify any grand claims made on her behalf.
¹⁷

‘And it may seem hard to tell whether the life she has lived was a good one,' the Dean continued. ‘“There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death. Even in laughter the heart is sorrowful; and the end of that mirth is heaviness.”'
¹⁸

Even as I listened to her vintage wisdom, I felt that my mother's funeral was being hijacked. I had to wonder if she'd have wanted to attend her own ceremony.

‘Everybody will one day find that their time has come, and if one tries to bolt the door, one might just find that death is come up into their windows,
¹⁹
so to speak.'

I looked away from the Dean and the coffin. Light filtered in through stained glass, transforming it from white-grey to ruby, like water to wine.

‘“For where a testament is, there must also of necessity be the death of the testator. For a testament is of force after men are dead: otherwise it is of no strength at all while the testator liveth.”
²⁰
And we can take comfort from that.'

I felt my shoulders sag. I glanced across at Max, who was biting a nail. Dad gave a defeated little huff, and stood, a handwritten page shaking in his hand as he made his way over to the lectern. He hated public speaking. He said hello to everyone, and glanced at Max, who gave him a tight nod.

All I can hear is echoes
, said Max.

Can you lip-read?
I signed.

Too far away
, Max replied.

Okay, I'll sign: ‘Mathilda was an amazing woman. I met her completely by chance when I was a door-to-door salesman. She answered the door and I started trying to sell her whatever I was flogging back then, but she'd just moved to England and barely spoke a word. Bloody hell, I thought—' (now he's apologising to the Dean for swearing) ‘—she's a corker. So rather than bother with my swatches or whatever, I told her I was an English tutor.' (Uncle Dave just did his dirty laugh.) ‘She really went for it, though, so I started giving her these lessons, and before I knew it she could speak English better than me. I expect everyone here knows that won't have been because of my language skills. She was always looking things up in dictionaries, you know. She loved her weird words.' (A couple of people are chuckling.) ‘She was clever and ambitious. But one thing or another clipped her wings. The move came at a bad time for her and she didn't get the right qualifications to go to a university here. She moved in with me, and I always think I didn't do enough to encourage her. Then we had the kids. When you're young, you always think you'll do everything, you'll beat life, and then you wake up one day and realise life's been beating you.' (He's stopped, he's crying.)

Max looked up. I had never seen Dad cry. It felt like stepping through my bedroom door as a child, and hearing it slam shut, and realising there was no handle on the other side.

‘But she was a good person,' he said vehemently. ‘She never did a bad deed in her life, and you all know it. She'd let you walk all over her, and she wouldn't bear a grudge. And she might have thought she had nothing to show for it at the end of the day, but God did it make you love her.'

Dad's eyes burned; Max shook my useless hand; I felt like I was falling.

And then that was that. My mother was buried. Everyone went back to their living. She had been; she was not. It had occurred to me before that my life somehow contained my death – that the story of my life had to end somewhere – but now I realised that the course of my life was determined all along the way by the deaths of others, her death contained in my life.

I could hardly find a job now. It seemed like an insult, the idea that I might turn away from thoughts of her and start squirreling away money. That I might just set her aside, like an unconvincing book, fending off guilt by telling myself that I would get around to preserving her memory one day. Before this, grief had been as inconceivable to me as a black winter coat in a summer heat wave. And yet here it was. I put it on and it fit. It formed a layer between the world and me. It was heavy and stifling; it tired me out, made me hungry. Without her and with Max now in a flat of his own, the routines of the house fell apart, and we rarely remembered to shop for food. One day, there was nothing left in the cupboard but the half-finished pack of Dutch waffles, which had gone stale. I ate each of them slowly at the kitchen table, willing them to offer some kind of bite, but they were soft and chewy. They were the last food she had bought. We had eaten every other trace. Time was undoing her effect on the world already. I went shopping at the big Tesco so that I could buy more Dutch waffles, seven or eight packs. It was good to have them there.

6

Back to School

Before I could think of finding a job, I decided to pay tribute to her, and to try to educate myself a little. I missed the way she would constantly feed me half-digested information like a bird to her chicks. It was only natural, then, that after her death I sought out a surrogate in the greatest pool of half-digested information in the world: Wikipedia. I did consider buying a selection of the popular
For Idiots
series when I found an offer on at W H Smith, but as I picked up
Self-Confidence for Idiots
, I wondered whether theirs was the right approach. And it wasn't as if the internet was still stuck in the era of my schooldays, when homework had involved triangulating a single line of information on the Encarta CD-ROM with the unlimited untruths of Altavista, Lycos, Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves. Now we had Wikipedia, and it was learning more and improving every day.

I started by learning about Wikipedia itself. The demographic for its top ten thousand editors was single males between eighteen and thirty with no partner, no children and a degree. Some people had made hundreds of thousands of edits, for no other reason than to contribute. It was a charity with 150 staff but four hundred million hits a month.
Nature
magazine said in a study that it was nearly as accurate as the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
. The
Encyclopaedia Britannica
only had about a hundred editors, but it did start in 1768. Some people had read the whole thing, all thirty-two thousand pages of it. I wondered if anyone would ever read all of the four million articles on the English language Wikipedia. I supposed it would be impossible now, that human knowledge had exceeded the capacity of any one human.

Now, I'd be the first, or the second, to admit that I don't know everything. But no one knows everything. By studying their behaviour, I had realised that many so-called clever people are really just people who know how to steer the conversation round to the things they know, and refuse to engage with topics that they don't know. So I decided there would be two phases to my education: the gathering of any old information I could find, and the proud disseminating of said information. My method was to start off on the day's ‘featured article', and keep clicking through articles until I felt I had learnt everything I could take in that day. I became, to coin a word, a
Wikipedophile
. As I lay in bed each day surfing and eating my weight in Dutch waffles, I became fat (and as my vocabulary improved, corpulent).

Over those first months, my grief wore in and I felt a little give in the shoulders. If grief had an equivalent of the Schmidt sting pain index, it might have relaxed from a 4 down to a 2.
²¹
I felt guilty, in case it meant that I had begun to care less, but I was also seized regularly by a vague ennui. For all that Mum might have approved of my project, my life seemed to have lost its track. I decided that the thing to do was to retrace my steps. Whenever I used to lose something, my mother always told me to retrace my steps.

I went to the milk depot. They looked like they were doing a roaring business. In fact, there was a brand new sign saying they had started offering long-life, the bastards.

I walked back past the school with its tessellated fence. There were no children playing today. It must be shut for the Easter holidays. A Rice Krispies Squares wrapper was caught in the fence, and a cherry tree had been snowing over in the corner near the vegetable patch. People ambled purposelessly by. I suppose most people don't have somewhere to be every minute of the day. At least, not in Salisbury, they don't.

I marched onwards until I reached the green by the cathedral and stopped to look up at the spire. I thought about my mother, the Russian doll, lying in two. My eyes watered a little – from the cold breeze. The clouds swam faster, and I began to feel a little nauseous as I stared at the tip of the spire. Again, I saw a red light flash on its tip. I wondered what it was for.

‘For the aeroplanes,' said a voice. I looked to the source of the sound, which was a small lady with short curly white hair and hands clasped like a Grecian key.
²²
I recognised her as Dean Winterbottom, who had given the service at the funeral.

‘Do aeroplanes land near here?' I asked, a little dazed.

She smiled as if I had made a joke.

‘Ugly little bugger, isn't it? Still, height regulations. The council insists.'

‘It looks like an aerial for receiving God's thoughts.'

‘I'd never thought of it like that,' she said. We stood in silence for a little while, looking up at the spire together. Then I felt her eyes on me. ‘Would you like to come in for a cup of tea? It's rather cold, and you've been standing out here for a good hour now.'

‘Have I? Well—' and here I looked back the way I had come to indicate the busy and fulfilled life that was waiting for me, ‘I'm sure I could stop for a cuppa.'

We went inside the cathedral. I stared at the rich colours of the glass and imagined a great choir chanting. I wondered whether I was allowed to come and hear the choir if I wasn't a proper Christian.

‘You see how it's thicker at the bottom?' Dean Winterbottom said, pointing to one of the larger panes. ‘It has flowed like that over time.'

‘That isn't really—'

‘Not many people know, but glass is actually a very slow liquid.'

‘No,' I said, knitting my brow, ‘That isn't right, I'm afraid. Everyone says it's a liquid, but it's just the way they used to make the glass. Sorry.'

‘Oh,' she said.

‘Sorry,' I said. ‘I wish it was true.'

For some reason I started crying. She looked at me kindly and held me by the shoulders.

‘Come on,' she said. ‘Let's get you that tea.'

Sitting in a little back office on a couple of worn and comfortable chairs, we talked a little about my mother. The Dean remembered the service, and my name. I really believed I was beginning to calm down. But when she started pouring out the tea in the little kitchenette, I sobbed with renewed vigour.

‘Whatever's the matter?' she asked, standing holding the milk bottle.

‘The milk,' I wailed.

‘This?' she asked, sniffing at it.

I realised how absurd I must have looked, and immediately started laughing in the slightly manic way that follows a good cry.

‘Please, pour the tea. I'm sorry,' I said, wiping my face on my sleeve. ‘It's been a strange few months. I lost my job as a milkman. I don't know anything else. I'm trying to figure out what I'm doing with my life. I don't feel quite myself.'

‘I can pour the tea without milk if you prefer?'

‘No, milk is fine, thank you.'

She brought the mugs over.

‘Well, you've come to the right place. As Jesus once said, “Trouble me not: the door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed.”'
²³

‘Did he?'

She sat down, leant forward and clasped her hands on the table. Her eyes were powder blue.

‘So what is it you're searching for?'

‘All I know is that I don't know,' I mumbled.

‘Could it be God?'

‘Maybe. I mean, I don't think so, but I'm not going to rule Him out. I suppose I just want something to do, like everyone else.'

‘Mmmm,' she purred. ‘Purpose.'

We thought about that word for a little while.

‘And what are you good at?' she asked eventually.

‘I pay close attention to detail. I'm honest, neat, good with my hands. I know a lot of trivia.'

‘Are you good with heights?'

‘I suppose so.'

‘Mmm.' She pulled at a stray hair on her chin.
²⁴
‘The Man Upstairs might have a job for you.' She must have seen me shrink back, because she smiled reassuringly. ‘Nothing out of the ordinary, I promise you. At least, nothing that would make it into a Dan Brown novel.'
²⁵

Nonetheless, I took a slurp of tea and checked my watch.

‘Something else is troubling you.'

I squirmed.

‘But you have the answers you need. You only need to strip away the impermanent. I'm not talking about the Bible now. God isn't bothered about eternity in the least, it is a very human concern. You need to find your little piece of eternity, wherever it is, and keep hold of it whenever you're unsure.'

She looked a little surprised at herself and when she unclasped her hands there were nail marks in her palms. We finished our drinks, she scribbled her phone number on the back of a Samaritans card, which I didn't think was much of a coincidence, and I gave her mine, pondering to myself that I rarely exchanged numbers with someone in good faith. Although, not to mislead you, I remained, at this point, very much a virgin.

I walked back out past streaks of stained light and into the whistling wind. I took the short route home. I supposed I was good with heights. But then, I supposed a lot of things.