Benjamin Tate spent his lunch hours, when the weather was neither too much one thing nor the other, on the bench in front of the building. He would always try to be the last to get up from his desk, that way he could avoid the awkwardness of his colleagues passing by in one joshing mass and not inviting him to join them. Of course, it wasn’t always bonhomie and pleasantries among the others. They, whoever they were that were occupying the desks alongside his, hadn’t always got on. There had been splits, divisions, bullying, fallings out and makings up. Even the odd romance had blossomed, wilted, flowered anew. But these social comings and goings had always occurred apart from Benjamin Tate, near to him, but wholly detached from him. The current occupiers – Pete and Sophia and, what was his name? Darren? Dylan? – were friends. He had the impression that they knew each other outside of work, and had done for a long time. Certainly, Pete and Damien – Damien, that was it – were long-time friends. As for Sophia, well, a rose between thorns and so forth.
On this Tuesday, he exited the vast white building after them and took his seat on the empty bench. It was March 3. It was early spring but winter’s fingertips still touched his neck and he pulled his collar up and ate his ham sandwiches under the thin sky and waited – he spent his life waiting, without ever wanting anything to arrive – for the hour to pass.
The day so far had been less brutal than he’d imagined. It was an anniversary, after all, an anniversary of sorts. But twenty years is an awfully long time. There were days now, even weeks, when he wasn’t haunted. March 3 was never going to be one of them, and he didn’t expect it to be, didn’t want it to be. He never wanted to forget that he was responsible – he still called it guilty some days – for the thing that had happened. At the back of his mind he always wondered if he’d know her card before even reading the name, if he’d pick it up perchance one cold autumn day, with the wind buffeting the unseen windows, and some intuitive part inside of him would instinctively know it. He supposed then, and only then, he’d at last be able to climb out of that hole and never return. In the meantime, all those names, all those dates down the side continuing and continuing and then not continuing.
At 2pm Benjamin Tate returned to his desk. There was conversation left over from lunch that he was not a part of. Drakely. Draper... Many Drapers. Dredge.
Just before 4pm, when his hands were trembling too much to continue, he got up and went into the bathroom. He locked the cubicle door and wedged them between his thighs. He was not alarmed. He’d experienced something similar on many occasions. It was just a matter of waiting again; this time waiting for something to pass. The bathroom door opened and he heard footsteps crossing the tiles. He raised his feet above the gap beneath the door. He heard a tap turn on and then someone coughed and spat. Then silence. His hands were still shaking, more violently now, sending convulsions up into his arms. He clamped his legs tighter around them, used his shoulders to wipe eyes that wouldn’t stop running. A second man entered. Benjamin Tate heard them chatting. He wondered how people could always think of something to say. Words begetting words. Then laughter. A tap again. More footsteps and then the bathroom was silent apart from a drip, curiously loud, echoing, like in a film. Benjamin Tate listened to it for a few more minutes and then, when he was sure he was alone, when he was sure the thing he was waiting to pass had passed, he unlocked the door and returned to his desk. By 4.59pm he was on Driffield.
So, hake. He heated the olive oil in the frying pan and then added the seasoned hake fillets, skin-side down. When the skin was beginning to crisp he added a few slices of butter to the pan, around the hake. He’d forgotten this step the first time, all those years ago, and had scraped and scratched at the pan until his meal was a scrambled mess. He didn’t like mess. When he was satisfied it was just so, he turned off the oven and arranged two immaculately presented fillets on his plate, alongside a ladleful of peas. He ate his dinner quietly at the table in front of the window and when he finished he washed and dried the cutlery and everything else he’d used and returned them to their rightful nooks and crannies. He refilled the kettle to a finger’s width above minimum and scooped a spoonful of coffee into a clean mug.
In the living room he turned on the television and stood motionless, gazing at it for a few minutes before turning it off and padding back down the hallway into his bedroom. He placed his slippers and dressing gown neatly on the stool and then climbed into bed. The softness of the mattress, the crack-and-whip feel of the sheets. He turned off the light and then looked up into the complete blackness of his room, waiting, again, for the day, March 3, to come to an end.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Benjamin Tate rose at 5am, as he always did on Saturdays, and took off his pyjamas. Once they had been folded correctly along the seams and placed under his pillow he walked down the hallway to the airing cupboard. It was cold in his flat and without any clothes on his body shivered in the half-light. He stretched his stiff leg behind him and reached down to take out the polish, the disinfectant and three separate cloths – each had their role – and then hurried back into his room.
It always began there now. In the past when he’d noticed mess he’d addressed it immediately before moving randomly around the flat in search of the next task. What must he have missed? What horrors must have lurked in corners, behind doors, at the back of drawers? No longer. He knew better now. Now the exacting, exhaustive routine – back to front, side to side, a forensic sweep of every surface exposed to impurity – was long-established. There should be absolutely nothing arbitrary, he believed, about the cleansing process.
It was, mostly, a case of going over old ground. He could count on a single hand the number of occasions when someone other than himself had been in his flat. He didn’t mind that. Mysophobia is a fear of germs and contamination. Both were carried by other human beings. Alone, cordoned off from the world, he had turned his small space into a sterilised quarantine. He cleaned up after himself immediately. He put things he used back in their rightful place immediately. He disturbed as little as he could and as infrequently as he could, and anything that somehow slipped through – an insurgent crumb, a fleck of this or a spill of that – was unfailingly collected, corrected, during these weekly purges.
The bedroom was simple. There was hardly anything in it. He himself was hardly in it. In under an hour he had polished the windowsill, the bed-knobs, the supporting frames of the small chair. He had scrubbed the skirting boards and taken a toothbrush to the dirt that had gathered in its tiny cracks. The clothes from each drawer had been removed and, after the drawers themselves had been wiped clean, refolded and replaced. The same thoroughness, the same taking out and putting back, had also been applied to the wardrobe and to the bedside table.
It was still dark when he moved towards the bathroom. If there was to be a serious issue it would be here. He hesitated in the doorway, maybe he could just leave it, but something in his tummy stirred, sat up, sniffed the air, and Benjamin Tate was compelled forwards. Once inside he began a careful scan all around him, seeking out the areas of concern. As he turned he caught sight of himself, his trunk, in the mirror. He gasped. He was always surprised when confronted with the bloated creature that had swallowed him. He was looking at a shapeless mass of white flesh. Four graceless slabs hung from it. Everything seemed to be slipping off its scaffolding. He had run once. He had harboured great, ambitious dreams. And now this. He was taxed by the stairs leading up to his red door. He used hands to lift heavy legs up them.
Benjamin Tate looked away. There was dust on the bulb. That would mean there was dust on all the bulbs. Had he checked the bulb in his bedroom? And on the light on the bedside table? There was dust on the switch too, and on the wall socket. There was grime on the window. Perhaps it wasn’t grime. Perhaps it was a trick of light and shadow. It could well be, at this time of the morning. Oh, if only he could have believed that. The tyrant that lived in his tummy would never abide such inattention, neglect even. He moved closer to the glass. It wasn’t grime. It was a brown smear of something he couldn’t identify. He backed away dubiously. The tyrant jumped to his feet. He was glaring. He was growing restless, agitated. Any moment now. When had he arrived, that sinister little cur down there, how had he seized such power?
‘Okay,’ Benjamin Tate said wearily. ‘Okay then.’
Twenty years ago the clock in his room was an hour slow six months out of every year, more things hadn’t been put away than had, letters, screwed up into balls and thrown under desks, would remain undisturbed for weeks. He envied that person, tried to remember what it was like to be him. He imagined it must have been like singing when you can’t hear yourself.
Once the window was clean he got down on his hands and knees. He found the hardened slick of toothpaste at the bottom of the sink, spied the single hair in the crack between the tiles that demanded he clean all the tiles, scrape all the cracks. He was sweating despite his nakedness. Drops fell off his brow onto the cold floor that required more disinfectant, more scrubbing. The muscles in his arms ached. His fingers were about to cramp. Every so often he paused, sat up on his haunches and stretched out his spine. It was ever thus, one thing leading to another to another. There was the bathtub. He would scrub it. There was the toilet seat. He would wipe it. There was the bin, the shower handle, the inside of the taps. The kitchen would take hours. He pictured the oven, the fridge, the bacteria that would be permeating within both. He would vacuum all the rugs and the radiators and take the nozzle to the wiry carpet in the living room for maximum effect. It wouldn’t be enough though. Why had no one invented a product that did the job as it was supposed to? People just played at cleanliness. No, he would have to get down there in the muck himself. He would have to press his cheek flat to the ground and pick away at all those things, real and not real, that were left behind, clinging on.
At one point in the late morning he gave up. He dropped the rag and the polish on the floor and then collapsed after them, rolling onto his back and letting his arms flop out next to him.
‘There’s nothing here,’ he said. ‘I’m done. Leave me alone now.’
Above him a fine thread of dust floated against the ceiling. From his prone position he counted four others in that room alone. He closed his eyes. The tyrant was up on his feet again. He was ranting. He was shaking his fist. He would never be laid down.
It was mid-afternoon when Benjamin Tate finally sat down at the small table. His lunch consisted of two fried eggs on a single slice of toast, as it always did on Saturdays. He ate slowly, cutting out small squares and chewing each mouthful thoroughly until it was like swallowing paste. He imagined it sliding down his throat and landing on the horrible little tyrant, burying him.
He knew where he came from of course, and when he had arrived. He’d been on the bus with him that day, about a year after the thing that had happened. Perhaps he’d been sitting behind him. Perhaps it had been his voice that had told Benjamin Tate to look at the old woman next to him, to notice the slick of saliva that had seeped from her mouth and was fermenting in a fold of her skin. She’d shown her gums to him then, and Benjamin Tate had nodded quickly and looked down. Her skin was sagging towards skeletal hands. On one was a plaster coloured with discharge. He looked away and the voice told him to notice the grease from a thousand heads on the window. Someone nearby had a wet cough. It dislodged phlegm and the voice said to him, ‘They’ll swallow that now.’ He started to listen to every cough and sneeze. ‘How many cover their mouths, do you think?’ the voice asked. He imagined all the tiny particles of spit spraying into the air, all those invisible microbes circulating through the bus. They would settle on his cheeks and lips and in his ears and the corners of his eyes. He looked again at the old lady. She was staring straight ahead with flaps of skin dangling under her chin. She was wheezing. Her gaunt body was struggling to perform its functions. ‘She’s rotting,’ the voice whispered. ‘That’s rot coming out of her nostrils when she exhales. It’s air that has been rolling around deep within her, through her veins, over her discoloured flesh, rubbing against and collecting all the decaying gunge that has gathered in the pit of her lungs.’
He thought of the filthy air leaking out of everyone else too, spilling out of one mouth, sucked into another. He tried not to breathe. The bus jolted and he bumped into the window. There was a smear where his head had scraped against it. ‘That’s all in your hair now,’ the voice said. He looked at the old lady again. The drool on her chin was gone. He realised that was on him too.
Benjamin Tate pushed his plate away and sat back in his chair. Through the branches of the big tree he could see the market stalls on the high street. He looked at his watch. It was 2.57pm. The crowds were thinning. Some stalls were being folded away. No matter. He would wander down there shortly. He liked being absorbed into something larger than himself, to be, even briefly, one reed among many reeds swaying on the riverbank. What was it that Pete had said? ‘There’s two kinds of people in the world; Benjamin Tate, and everyone who’s not Benjamin Tate.’ He could remember the friendly squeeze on his shoulder and the way Pete had looked at him, not unkindly, as he sat back down. He’d not meant it to be as true as it was.
Perhaps he would see Clare there again, too, as he had done once before. He remembered the relief he felt, the preposterous relief, when he noticed that her friends were all female. Poor Clare. What would she think of him if she knew? He took his plate into the kitchen and washed it up. In the hall he swung his arms into his jacket and then squatted down to decide on his shoes. He was leaning towards the brown pair.
Suddenly he heard a noise. It was close, unnatural, it didn’t belong there. He stood up and listened. After a moment it happened again, and he looked at the offending red door. He didn’t believe it. It had done this to him before, knocked against its hinges, called him over and then sniggered behind his back as he stared at the empty square of carpet on top of the landing and the bare wall opposite. He waited. When the sound came for a third time he approached cautiously, and then, almost without warning, an arm wearing his coat was swinging up from his peripheral vision to open it.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Clare walked down the same road for the third time that afternoon. In her bag was a wallet. It wasn’t hers. Finally, she spotted an alley tucked away between two houses and partially concealed by the trunk of a giant elm. Halfway down the alley was a glass door. She tried the handle. It was unlocked and opened onto a small stairwell that led up into shadow. She imagined ghosts and ghouls lurking up there among the cobwebs. As she climbed she became aware of a sharp smell. It became more pungent the higher she went and made her want to sneeze. On the landing was a second door, a red one. She tipped her head sideways to read the toppled over number four that was nailed to it, and then knocked.
The wallet in her bag had been handed in by a customer. At the close of day she had gone through it with a colleague to identify its owner and found his face – how old was he, thirty? Sixty? – staring out from a photograph on a card. She remembered him. He had been there a few days earlier, and many times before that. He never stayed long. He walked with a limp which was more pronounced some days than others, and he seemed always in such a rush, as though important things would remain undone until he and he alone had done them. ‘But you must recognise him,’ she’d said to her colleague.
‘Oh, Clare,’ her friend had replied, ‘you’re such a Florence Nightingale. Please be careful.’
She knocked a second time on the red door and then listened to the lack of noise on the other side. She looked at her watch. The market would be winding down now, the fruit left behind would be rotting in their crates. She looked for a letter box through which she could post the wallet. There was none. Perhaps she had missed it coming in. She knocked a third time and was just about to turn away when the door opened. He poked his head around it suspiciously.
‘Oh hello,’ she began. She wasn’t wearing her work blouse. How unrecognisable people appear when seen out of context; in our heads we limit their lives to the parts and places where we overlap and we can’t compute when they appear unexpectedly somewhere else. ‘I work at– ’ The door slammed in her face. The unnecessary violence made the brassy number rattle with rage. She hesitated, unsure whether to knock again or leave. After a moment a crack of light appeared, reappeared, between door and doorway, and a wide eye stared at her through it.
‘Benjamin?’ she said. ‘Benjamin Tate?’
Clare was Clare George. She was twenty-four. She was kind and had duly suffered because of it. The world doesn’t like kind things, doesn’t trust them. When she was a young girl she used to give her pocket money to her friends. Her parents had scolded her but she’d argued, quite logically, that it was her money and didn’t they want her to do things with it that made her feel good? But they had been right. By the time she was ten those same friends had started demanding things from her, things she hadn’t wanted to give away. It came to a head when her father gave her a wooden box he’d carved himself for her birthday. Inside it were sentimental keepsakes; teeth of hers that had fallen out, locks of hair, drawings they’d dutifully held on to. Her friends – they were no longer her friends by this time – told her to hand it over and when she refused they took it from her by force, tipping its contents out into a hedge and running away laughing. Clare shouted after them but they ignored her. She watched them throwing the box between them like a ball. They kept dropping it and dropping it and dropping it. In spite of this, or maybe because of it, she refused to change. She sought the good in people, especially those people in whom it was harder to find.
Benjamin Tate stood before her now teetering unsteadily on a single leg. The other was wrapped behind it. His hands were hidden deep within pockets, pulling his shoulders forward and his head down. It created the impression of someone who was concealing as much of themselves as they could. He was blushing furiously. Every part of skin that was visible above the collar of his coat was deep crimson, and sweat pockmarked his hairline. She watched without looking as one bead then another dislodged itself. It was fascinating how they fell at different speeds, slowing, pausing, rushing on again.
‘I have something you want,’ she said. She took his wallet out of her bag and held it up before her. He stared at it for so long that she began to doubt it was his, before he extricated a hand and pinched a corner of it between two precise, pincer-like fingers. Immediately that hand squirrelled back into its hide, out of sight.
‘You’re very lucky to see it again,’ she said. ‘I’ve taken the cash out obviously, as a reward, but everything else is still in there.’ He didn’t react, and she looked at him strangely. ‘I’m kidding.’ They stood a moment then, each waiting for the other to do something. A loud faraway crack suddenly burst into the room, disrupting the silence. Everything stiffened and then slowly relaxed again. Individual raindrops, heavy and sporadic, began to tap loudly on the glass. ‘Anyway,’ she said, when she could think of no reason to linger, ‘I had better leave you to it.’
Immediately he turned and walked into the room. She noticed his limp again, how he dragged a foot that pointed outwards. At the window he stopped but didn’t turn around. What was it that intrigued her about people like him? But what did that mean, people like him? She didn’t know him. Unorthodox people then, awkward people, those who make those around them uncomfortable. When her friend had called her Florence Nightingale she’d waved a hand at her and insisted she was finished with all that, with broken pipes that leaked out all the water she could give them – where had that line come from? – she must have rehearsed it. There had been a succession of these listless, impotent men that her generation seemed to specialise in, and she was fed up.
Joe had been the most recent of them. He was twenty-eight. He lived at home. He had no job, or rather, he had a hundred jobs and finished none of them. She had been halfway through another pep talk when she stopped, stood up, and told him abruptly that she was leaving. A trace of fear had passed behind his eyes, a recognition then that he needed to act, but oh-so quickly he’d found his way back to victimhood, had scowled at her and said if she failed to understand him, even she, then the whole world would fail to understand him, and he’d never stood a chance anyway. What had she ever seen in him to be so hopeful? What had she seen in any of them? She had always made their excuses and always been so disappointed to discover that they had none.
It was raining fully now. The glass drummed with noise. Beyond it the bark of the old tree darkened as it wetted. Perhaps she wouldn’t go to the market after all. Benjamin Tate. She said the name to herself in her head. She could picture her friend tutting, her father looking at her with his sad, not-again-Clare eyes. But people were too quick to judge. She couldn’t fathom why everyone was made so uncomfortable by difference, by the misunderstood or the opaque. She had always believed, or tried to believe, that what separates us, what marks us out as individual, should not be mocked or concealed, but celebrated. ‘You’re an old soul,’ her father said. She doubted it. She thought she was too optimistic to be old in any way at all.
He’d not yet moved and she looked away from him, around the room. It was ludicrous. It was hard to believe he actually lived there, or anyone did. There were three bookcases, each full without any noticeable gaps on the shelves, but besides that there was no sign of him. She looked at the single chair, the table, the hunchbacked television the likes of which she’d not seen in years. The walls were bare. The smell that she’d first detected on the stairwell – she realised now it was the smell of hospitals – overpowered whatever human smell there might have been.
‘It’s very tidy,’ she said. It was the kindest thing she could think of. He turned then and she smiled at him. He looked away quickly and shuffled off to the bookcases to busy himself there. She thought, oddly, of a skittish coyote circling on the outskirts.
‘You have an awful lot of them,’ she said.
‘Four hundred and thirty-nine.’
She realised it was the first time he’d spoken. How small his voice was. It was tinny and difficult to hear. It came from his mouth but conveyed nothing of him at all. It didn’t fit somehow. She went and stood next to him and he visibly flinched, pulling himself closer together, trying to occupy an even smaller space. Occasionally she took a book out, paged through it idly, replaced it. Once, when she put a book back he took it out again and replaced it somewhere else, near where she had slotted it in but not exactly there.
‘Sorry,’ she said.
