Читать книгу Commencing Our Descent - Suzannah Dunn, Suzannah Dunn - Страница 6

Yesterday, I was on a train, gazing through the window, with my headphones on and a CD spinning, when, from beyond the foam cushions of my earpieces, I heard, ‘Sadie.’ I looked up at a man in a suit as he reminded me, ‘Edwin Robinson: we met on Sunday at George Reynolds’ house.’

‘Oh, yes.’ I smiled, not knowing what else to say or do. I knocked the headphones down the length of my hair; the foam pads became pincers on the base of my throat. ‘Yes, hello. Edwin.’ His name was news to me.

‘Hello.’ He smiled, in return, without moving a facial muscle: somehow he gave an impression of smiling. ‘Do you mind?’

Mind what? What had I done?

He indicated the vacant seat opposite me.

‘Oh, no, no.’

But, of course, I did; I did mind. Already, I had been captivated by the view, a screening of endlessly familiar suburbs, as slick as an advert. I was giving myself up to solitude, indolence, music: that unique, magical combination, my compensation for having to endure the train. The horrors of train travel: sunshine baked inside double-glazed, dirt-glazed windows; the ferocious slams of doors; blocked toilets and waterless taps; depleted buffets; delays. And now someone with whom I would be hard-pressed to pass the time of day, but with whom I would have to spend forty minutes.

He looked exactly as he had looked at George’s house: he could have been waiting at the station all week. I was dressed very differently from how I had been dressed on Sunday: I was in clothes for a trip to town rather than something that resembled a tennis dress. But even with a disc of black glass over each eye and a contraption over my head and ears, I had been recognisable: my hair, a beacon.

He was apologetic: ‘Actually, there’s nowhere else.’

As far as I could see, every vacant seat bore a white card. ‘Reservations?’

He muttered, ‘Reservations, I’ve had a few.’ Then, ‘Don’t let me stop you.’

I had no idea what he meant.

He pointed to my CD player.

‘Oh,’ I smiled my thanks, ‘no.’

‘No, please: listen away. Do.’

‘No, really.’ My solitude, indolence and music in front of him? I would have taken more kindly to a proposal that he watch me have a bath.

‘I’d hate to think that I could come between you and …’ He looked away, to the window, before asking, ‘something poppy?’

Momentary confusion, for me, so I explained, ‘That’s my nickname.’

An eyebrow kinked, questioning.

‘Poppy.’

‘Oh, I am sorry.’

Was this sympathy? and how dare he? or an apology? and if so, for what? for the inadvertent familiarity?

He continued, ‘How nice. Because of your hair?’

I inclined my head, to give him what was intended as a long look: Stupid question. For a second, I pondered the symbolism of poppies: late-blooming? death-defying? full of opium?

‘Who uses this nickname of yours?’ But suddenly he backtracked, ‘I suppose that’s rather a personal question.’

‘Not at all.’

How quaint: a personal question.

I replied, ‘Almost everyone.’ This was the best that I could do; a more adequate account would have required my life story, friend by friend. I said, ‘Friends, family.’

Old friends, I had been about to say, before realising that I had no other kind: new friend being, for me, I realised, a contradiction in terms. With the exception of George; if I could count George.

‘So, the hair colour’s natural?’

‘You think anyone would try to sell this?’

He smiled. And this time, I saw how: a narrowing of the eyes; a tightening in one corner of the mouth. ‘Perhaps they should.’

Then he nodded towards my CD player. ‘So, something poppy? Something I’m too old to know?’

I was amused: ‘How old do you think I am.’ A rhetorical question.

But he replied. ‘Mid-twenties.’

I shook my head, owned up, ‘I’m the wrong side of thirty.’

‘Mid-twenties is the wrong side of thirty.’

I wanted to say, For a man, perhaps. Instead, I told him what he wanted to know: ‘I was listening to something called “NYC’s no lark”.’

‘Well, however old you are,’ he said to the window, to the swill of suburbs, ‘I’m sure that you’re not old enough to have come across that the first time around.’

So, either he knew his Bill Evans, or he had glanced over and read the CD case. Suddenly I saw how he was different from Sunday: no glasses; on Sunday he had been wearing glasses. Did he wear glasses for work? Even if that work consisted only of listening? He had shadows of tiredness, a purple petal dropped beneath each eye.

He said, ‘Not the happiest of tracks.’

‘Schubert said there’s no happy music. Obviously, he hadn’t heard Jelly Roll Morton.’ Then I asked, ‘Did George tell you, this morning, about his mother?’

‘I’m a historian, not a psychoanalyst.’

‘She used to cook for the prisoners in the cell in the station; even though she loathed cooking, and couldn’t cook, she had to provide those meals because she was the policeman’s wife.’

He was paying attention, now.

‘She’d been a flapper, George says; lots of tennis and parties. Then she married his father, late; in the days when late-twenties was late. Never took to small-town life, though.’

A wince of a smile, again: an unspoken, Who does?

I asked him, ‘Do you have a nickname?’

‘No.’

‘Not one that you know, anyway.’

And he laughed, but barely: an admission, his head bowed.

The reserved seats remained unoccupied throughout the journey: a mass missing of a train. Our unmaterialised travelling companions had a lucky escape. The train had been in a station for a few minutes when a disembodied, distorted voice informed us that we were experiencing a delay due to an electrical fault which has caused a failure of the doors.

Edwin worried, ‘How do doors fail? How do doors fail?’

‘They fail to open.’

‘Are you saying that we’re stuck?’ He stared at me, in disbelief. His irises were a visceral blue.

‘Well, that’s what he’s saying.’

‘Do you think that he’s having us on?’

Inside my head was the refrain, Jeepers, creepers, where d’you get those peepers?

He slid a mobile phone from his pocket. ‘Necessary,’ he remarked, apologetically, indicating it, ‘because I’m mobile, much of the time. Or, rather, because I’m not.’ He pushed a single button, told someone, ‘I’m stuck on a train, and I do mean stuck.’ He would ring again, he said, when he reached London.

‘Work?’ I sympathised, when he had finished.

‘Wife. Late lunch.’

It hardly needed saying, but I said it anyway: ‘Even later, now.’

‘Looks as if she’ll be lucky to see me for breakfast tomorrow.’ Then he asked me where I was going, and what I would be doing.

I said that I was on my way into London to meet up with my friend Fern.

‘Fern? Fern and Poppy? What is this? The flower fairies?’

‘Fern’s her real name,’ I qualified, rather pointlessly.

She is nothing like a fern; she is silvery, and brisk.

I was going to see Fern because, last week, Philip had said, ‘Why don’t you take the day off, on Friday?’

All that I could say was, ‘Off from what?’

Sagely, he had replied, ‘From your routine.’

He would be covering a sleep-in for one of his staff, so would have a day in lieu at home with Hal.

‘Hal and I’ll be boys together,’ he enthused. ‘We’ll kick a football around the park and then go to the pub.’ London was his suggestion for me: he knows how I like to spend my time; he seems to know better than I do, nowadays.

Edwin offered me his phone: ‘Can you reach her, to warn her that you’ll be late?’

I did not tell him that I had my own phone, and merely declined his offer. I had time in hand: Fern was doing something else over lunchtime. She is always doing something. Free time, of which she has so little, seems to hold a terror for her: time, for her, is to be used. Having fitted me into her schedule with a coffee or two, she would then travel across town to the offices of a Sunday newspaper. She works two evenings each week as a subeditor. The job helps to fund her expensive training.

‘Fern’s training as an analyst,’ I told Edwin, and clarified, ‘psycho.’

‘Freudian Fern.’

‘Lacanian,’ I admitted, ‘sounds like a baby milk formula, to me.’

‘Appropriately, somehow.’

Why had I thought of Fern when planning my day in London? Probably because I knew that she, the busiest of my friends, would make time to see me at such short notice. I knew, too, though, that she makes the time not because she is generous or keen, but because she is organised. She lives to a schedule, and so she rises to the challenge, allocates me a slot. Sitting there in that train carriage, my journey suspended, I became aware of how I was braced, dreading her. During the past couple of years, she has changed. Hers is that state of mind into which most of my friends disappeared for a while during their twenties. They had time on their side, and eventually eased up, stopped trying to prove themselves and distance themselves from the past. In time, they relaxed; they came round. For Fern, late developer, the new identity could be permanent.

Lately, I have been wondering why I like her. The same, perhaps, as wondering if I like her. The same as wondering why I ever liked her. Originally, when we were sixth-formers, I liked her because she was likeable. The words that come to mind – funny and warm – say no more than that: she was likeable; I liked her. In recent years, she seems to have gone through a sense of humour menopause. The world is simply something with which she deals, and there is no give in her. I make rare appearances in her diary, but otherwise there is no place for me in that dealt-with life, not even as a memory. Perhaps especially not as a memory. In latter years, she has made a series of advantageous moves to become who she is now: wife of a BBC producer; mother of a year-old son; homeowner in Crouch End; sub on a Sunday paper; and Tavistock-trainee. Having taken the steps as they became available to her, she has kicked over the traces. I am an unwelcome reminder of how far she has come.

The doors continued to fail, and the train was delayed for an hour. We weathered the heatwave in a block of conditioned, manufactured air. Outside, on the station platform, the kiosk’s newspapers detailed disasters that had happened elsewhere on the tracks in a week of jinxed journeys: a ninehour delay on one train, a fire and fatality on another, and the driver who had turned by mistake into the grounds of a nuclear power station.

When there had been no more from the disembodied voice for ten minutes, one of our fellow passengers stood up and announced to the carriage that he was going to find the guard.

‘I’d hate to have that guard’s job,’ I said to Edwin.

He said, ‘I’d hate to have any job other than mine,’ and asked, ‘what about you? What do you do?’ Properly cautious, he revised: ‘Or what did you do? or would you like to do?’

So, I told him about Jacqueline: for five years before her death from pneumonia a year and a half ago, she lived with me; we were best friends when students, and then, just after graduation, she was injured in a car accident.

‘Head injuries,’ I said.

Those who never knew us before the accident assumed that we were sisters and that was why she lived with me. In fact, I explained to Edwin, there was nowhere for her to go: her father was dead; her mother, ill for years with depression; her brother and sister-in-law busy with a toddler and new baby. The only solution, in Jacque’s case, was a rehabilitation centre, nearly a hundred miles away, where she was the youngest resident by more than thirty years.

‘The staff were nice, but they were staff, if you know what I mean.’

And there were so many of them. So many hands. Timetables, job titles, Key Worker.

‘She needed a home. I couldn’t leave her there. And I wasn’t working, at the time; I wasn’t doing anything else.’ I shrugged – no big deal – but below these words, the whole truth slid like a fish, barely detectable and faintly repulsive.

‘I had the help of Philip, my husband.’

Not that he was my husband, then. But we were living together, because I had taken him up on his offer: if I wanted to provide a home for Jacqueline, I should live with him. She is part of our past, was part of our start. Caring for Jacque was possible because we had compensation money, we had equipment, help, and because we had each other. I had muscles, too, in time.

‘She was very small,’ I reassured Edwin.

She had-always been small, but was smaller when she came home from the residential centre, her muscles wasted from lack of use. Smaller still when she died: barely able to move a muscle, she had barely a muscle to move. She shrank, over the years, and I grew. I am small again now. We both wore clothes labelled eight or ten: in my case, size; in hers, years. Did she ever glimpse and comprehend her labels, those graphic illustrations of her diminution? It occurs to me, now: why did I never think to remove them?

More than a year ago, she was already dead; a year ago, she had been dead for months. During that whole first year, my grief was undiminished. Almost as shocking to me as her death was how that gaping loss remained unmitigated, month by month. Her absence was raw; her death, a fundamental and disabling severance. But the slow passage of that time had an odd effect: when I was still near to her death, I was very near; and then suddenly I was worlds away. And that is where I am, nowadays: worlds away, with no prospect of return; remembering surprisingly little, and vaguely resentful that even her loss has moved away from me.

How strange, on that train, with Edwin, to be saying and hearing Jacque’s name. She rarely, if ever, surfaces in conversation, nowadays. Not even with Philip. Perhaps especially not with Philip. I remember how, a couple of days after her funeral, I mentioned beginning to look for work, because I felt that I should, because I was clueless as to what else I should do; and, gently, kindly, Philip admonished me with, ‘After this, you’ll need time to find your feet.’ That was the moment when I wanted to scream, And what about you? Why didn’t I? He has always been careful of me, but more so since Jacqueline died. I feel that I am forever protecting him from me.

I never doubted that Jacqueline understood me, on some level: that she caught the drift, detected the undercurrent. She was incapable of more than indicating the most basic of preferences – her speech badly affected, practically obliterated – but I am certain that what was happening inside her head was nothing like that which happens inside the head of a small child. She was nothing like a child; she was Jacqueline, changed, but not into a child. No one ever changes back into a child. Nothing so uncomplicated. I talked a lot to her, told her a lot. We were together almost all the time. We passed the days listening to music, to the radio, watching television, going shopping and to the Day Centre, and to her various medical and therapeutic appointments, of which there were many. Everyone seems so sure that I gave up on something for her. But what? What else – what more – would I have had? People think that I lost the world, that I was lost to the world. And, yes, that is what accidents do: they befall you and you keep on falling; they take you from the world, either for a while or forever. But what was the world, to me? Only now that I am having to return to the world, am I lost. I have never been as lost as I am now.

Glancing over, I saw that he was watching me; he was watching more than listening. Or listening to more than the words. And he was opened up for more. All of him was in that wide-open gaze, and I was on the brink, hushed, buoyed by my unspoken words. Then, a pulse of eyelashes before once again he was self-contained, self-conscious, that gaze folded away.

After my day in London, I travelled home quite late, the land dipped into shadow, the sky a blue like the white of an eye. Darkness hardened around the train; but above, delicate plane trails were splashed by the sinking sun and tinted peachcoloured. For a while, several of them ran parallel, as if in a race; a slow race, the speed shrunk within the expanse of sky. For the first time ever, I wondered how many more summers I would see. Probably no more than could be counted on my fingers and toes, twice over. A finite number of summers.

This morning the sky is cloudless again, but looks breathed upon. Hal and I have come a little later than usual to the park because a man came to advise me on the polishing of the floorboards in the front room.

Yesterday, when he had heard the story of Jacqueline, Edwin had asked, tentatively, ‘And now?’

‘Oh, now. Well, for now, I’m doing the house.’

‘Doing what to the house?’

‘Everything. Everything needs doing, nothing was done for years.’

Nothing, during the years when I was busy with Jacqueline; and then nothing during my listless year of mourning. And then, gradually, a couple of months ago, I realised how much needed to be done, and how little else there was for me to do. All the usual maintenance is taking place alongside the necessary re-conversion: when Jacqueline came to live with us, the house was converted; now that she has gone, ramps and handrails are being removed, some flooring replaced, her elaborate bathroom dismantled, and the front room – which was her bedroom – redecorated, reinstated. I am re-converting the house so that we can live without her.

The floorboards man, who came to the house this morning, was a twin; he told me that he had never had a room of his own when he was a child, because he was a twin. I had always wanted a twin: no mere sib, but a twin. He told me that his two elder brothers were twins too, and two of his own three children, one of whom had twins of her own. I was enchanted by this fairytale family, twins within twins, a Siamese version of a Russian doll.

‘I never realised that they ran so clearly in families.’

‘Children?’ he quipped.

But he had saved the biggest surprise until last: the kind of twinning that runs in families is the non-identical kind. The twins in his extraordinary family are the ordinary kind.

What then, I wonder, is the chance of such a family having identical twins? The same chance, presumably, as that of any other family having identical twins. I like to turn the puzzle around: what is the chance of being born an identical twin to such a family, of all families; to a family which specialises in the non-identical kind? Surely a tiny chance, quite spectacular.

None of this matters to Hal: he was one puppy in a multiple birth, the others unknown to him and insignificant. All that matters to him is me. And a few minutes ago, here in the park, he lost me. He was trotting ahead when he saw a spaniel, the spaniel saw him, and they were compelled to bound towards each other with the usual reckless enthusiasm. Predictably, they stopped short and stood tall before embarking on the final few cautious, mannered paces. The noses touched for a second, then glided down the other’s body. I wondered how dogs regard human handshakes. What is so civilised about the taking, holding, squeezing of a hand? Because who knows where a hand has been? Hands go everywhere; that is what hands do. How intimate, to reach for the hand of another person, to place one’s own hand into that of another person.

As soon as Hal had fulfilled his social obligation to the spaniel he was ready to return to me. He looked up but somehow missed me. He stiffened, straining to peer into the distance, but panic blinded him to me.

I called, ‘Hal!’ but he failed to hear. His outline, usually slack with contentment, was crystal clear with desolation.

I hurried towards him, yelling, ‘Hal! Hal! Here!’ My final note hit home and he scampered, but in the opposite direction.

I bellowed again, ‘HERE!’ but by then he was further away than my voice could carry. I was losing him, he was galloping away from me towards the road. I stopped, as if this would stop him too and make him turn around.

‘HALHALHAL!’

Suddenly his radar worked: he circled, skidding, to lock on to this ululation of mine; suddenly he was running fiercely towards me, doubled-up, his body tightened for speed. Nearer, he slowed down, feigned nonchalance, trotted to a tree trunk. We have suffered these panics of his on previous occasions and each time I have been aghast that he could think that I would leave him: here one minute and quite simply gone the next? Why else does he think that I am here with him but to follow him, to watch for him and take him home with me again?

Now we are winding down, meandering towards the café. The man who is sometimes still asleep beneath blankets on a bench in the Scented Garden is awake and sitting on the low wall which borders the café’s terrace. Beside him is a café cup, but no saucer: tea, no trimmings. The word for men like him, when I was a child, was tramp; a word not dissimilar in connotation to grandpa. Tramps knew their place, which was benches and ditches; they did not camp in shop doorways as homeless people do nowadays. And they were given food rather than money. George told me that the tramps of his own childhood were shell-shocked veterans of the First World War, of which his father was a fellow veteran; and that his father, not known for his benevolence, took care of them, bathed and fed them. ‘They came to their own kind,’ he said.

When I was a child, the term homeless was never used, and instead I remember talk of the open road. I was under no illusions, I knew that our local tramps were afflicted with madness of the mumbling, visionary variety; I knew that they were infested with fleas and lice; but I knew, too, that they inspired an awe that had something to do with those roads, to do with walking away from our comfortable world like saints. The awe had something to do with their return, too. I remember how people spoke of them: Yesterday I saw Hopalong in the churchyard, I hadn’t seen him for, ooh, a couple of years; Haven’t seen old Jack since that terrible Christmas. Our tramps were landmarks, even in their absence. Perhaps especially in their absence. We were touched that within their nomadism lived a homing instinct, like a weep from a wound.

This man, who has been living here for a couple of months, is a throwback, a storybook tramp: he has the bushy beard and hair, and sleeps on a bench. But the beard is dark rather than grandpa-grey, and well-kept. His clothes, too, look fairly new and clean; unstylish, but new-ish, clean-ish. Sometimes he wears a pair of sunglasses which are too small for him, the frame slightly splayed: children’s sunglasses, perhaps; perhaps given to him, perhaps found. Today his eyes are bare, he is squinting in the sunshine. Sometimes he wears a pair of startlingly white trainers; other times, his feet are bare. Today he has his back to us, he is facing the sun, so I cannot see.

We often pass each other on these paths. He walks purposefully, trainers or no trainers. During the past couple of months I have passed him so many times that these days I am unsure whether to acknowledge him. There is no one else here whom I pass daily but do not acknowledge. What I am unsure of is whether he would want to be acknowledged. I wonder what he sees whenever he sees me approaching: me, in a crisp little summer dress; following my glossy, golden hound; stepping out to savour the sunshine, circling the park, and returning home. I wonder if he wonders why I am so often in tears.