He walked over to the bookcases. He tried to recall which ones Clare had touched and he touched them also. He stood where she had stood and inhaled the air she had exhaled, imagining the atoms she’d left fizzing in the room attaching themselves to him. In his bedroom he took off his clothes and put a hand on the soft bundle between his legs. He lifted it up, let it drop again. It made a flat, slapping sound. Skin on skin. He prodded it like a child might prod a lifeless hamster.
‘Good heavens,’ he said, ‘the state of that.’
He’d been dead for years. He thought of his children, the ones he had never and would never father. Two boys, always two boys, but only one ever appeared properly to him. He had short, straight brown hair and long, girl-like eyelashes. The second son was never seen, was always just accepted as being there, as happens in dreams sometimes. They burst in on him at rare moments, bringing with them on their coats and in their hair the smell of the outdoors. Their shrieks and whoops would scatter the silence and for a short while everything would come alive. He’d stand in its midst and watch until the long-lashed one stopped suddenly and stared, as if surprised to see Benjamin Tate there. He would panic then, trying to think of what he might say to make them stay. But he never could, and whatever whirlwind had carried them in would carry them out again and, always, all at once, he would find himself gazing dully about him, with only the big tree and the books on their shelves for company while the silence crept stealthily back.
His boys, faint phantoms in the air of little people who had gone or not quite arrived. They never aged. Yes, he missed them terribly. There must be a place, or many places, where all the things that could have happened are happening still, where the longed-for things are being lived out.
And their mother, where was she? Who was she? He didn’t need to wonder. She was Madeline of course, in these fantasies, or delusions rather. Had that really been her in the passing car, staring at him, mouth agape, however long it was now? He felt it must have been simply because of the impression it had made on him. One thing he’d never forgotten about her was how tightly she’d held his hand, not just the first night, but every night. He’d felt at the time, arrogantly – but aren’t all young men arrogant? – that she gripped him like that because she’d been suspended above a great chasm and he was the only one holding on to her. He’d felt the weight of her pulling at him and eventually he had let go. He saw her falling and falling into the abyss until the blackness swallowed her up. He’d been wrong, of course. They’d been upside down, and the dark well had been beneath him the whole time.
All that life. All that life he had actively, deliberately deprived himself of. ‘You don’t deserve it,’ he had written. He looked again at the numb appendage dangling dormant between his legs.
Benjamin Tate opened a drawer now and retrieved the only pair of shorts he still owned – they came with a belt and zip – and a short-sleeved shirt that had a collar and buttons. They would have to do. He put them on and then, avoiding the mirror, looked at the slippers and the dressing gown sitting patiently on the stool. He shrugged at them. ‘Everyone has to start somewhere,’ he said. ‘Or start again somewhere.’
The park was unchanged despite all the years. The tennis courts had gone, had been replaced now by a playground that didn’t resemble any of the playgrounds he’d played in, while the old playground, the playground where he’d met her, was a ruined and desolate thing on the far side that nobody had bothered to dismantle. He wondered how long graffiti lasted.
He began shuffling along the path that ran around its perimeter. How many times had he been along this path? Once upon a time he’d been the Pope of the Park; that’s what he had dubbed himself, from the puffs of white smoke that trailed after him when he ran on winter mornings. Now he felt like an imposter. He was the slogger now. He had known immediately that he’d never run again, after the thing that had happened, at least not the way he had. His right kneecap had split in two when the key had gone through it. Part of his patella had escaped to the back of his leg, out the way, while a much larger part had shot halfway up his thigh. Sitting in the car afterwards, his fingers had traced its shape beneath his skin, not realising what it was. But the real damage had been done to the wires and cables behind the knee, the bits that held all the other bits in place. That is what had brought about a permanent end to his days as an athlete.
He kicked his legs out a few times, trying to loosen them up, and then leant over his waist towards his toes. He’d been able to place his palms flat on the ground once, now he hung on the end of taut hamstrings with his hands no lower than the middle of his shins. His knee, lined with scars, was in front of his eyes.
He began walking, cautiously at first, then a little brisker. He broke into a slow jog. It felt odd. He remembered how his arms had relaxed at his sides and he tried to recreate that feeling, loosening his shoulders and letting his elbows bounce. Tap. Tap. Tap. He waited for his breath to find a rhythm in time with his step. It didn’t feel like it should. He waited. Another runner passed him coming the other way and smiled.
Faintly, in the background, his knee began to throb. He passed the playground. There was the bench. What had possibly become of her? He realised he was waiting for her card to land on his desk too. Suddenly a searing pain shot up his leg and he lurched to a stop. He cupped his knee in both hands and breathed steadily.
He’d not kissed anyone since Madeline. He tried to remember which had been the final kiss. So often final times pass unnoticed while we’re thinking of bigger, better things to come. There had been girls since her, but like Clare, they had never known it. The affairs had all played out in his head, had been no more than outlets for the hopes and hankerings inside him that had nowhere else to go. There was the blonde girl whom he’d first seen at the bus stop, and Becky, fulsome Becky, with the wicked laugh that suggested she was laughing at something other than the joke. And Louise, who ran a market stall selling hats, and Tanya, who cut his hair, and Tina, Tabatha, Tracy… These weren’t their real names.
He had made a more decisive effort once, at what exactly he wasn’t sure. It was a faltering, misguided effort, and it served only to reinforce his belief that this world was not meant for him, nor him it. He had gone to visit a lady whose advert he’d found in the local newspaper at a time when local newspapers still existed and such ladies still placed such adverts in them. She’d opened the door wearing an elaborate get-up that comprised mostly of string to which small, desultory triangles of pink material had been attached. It made him think of catapults. There were, in places, if he remembered correctly, tassels and fluffy borders. She’d asked for the money and then when he’d handed it to her, such a strange sensation, she’d turned her back on him and walked into her room. He could still see her small buttocks rubbing together, twisting the black string that was half buried between them. The room was dark. Curtains were drawn and there was a weak lamp on the floor. Something had been draped over it, a T-shirt perhaps, subduing its light still further. What was it that visitors were not meant to notice?
In the middle of the floor, almost occupying it completely, there was a bed, large and hollow and flimsy-looking. He wondered how it stood up to the treatment it must receive. Sprawled over the mattress was a scruffy white blanket that in later years, when his phobia was full-blown, he’d never have touched. She’d pointed to the bed and he’d sat down. A yard in front of him she began to unbind herself from the rigging that had been erected around her sparse frame and he turned his gaze to the gap between his feet. She glanced up. ‘You.’ She waved a finger in his direction. ‘Take off.’ He leant forward and began to undo his shoelaces. Her bare feet padded out the top of his vision and then a light switched on somewhere. He heard urine splash into a bowl and looked up to see her sitting on the toilet. She seemed then to remember he was there and reached over and swung the door closed. He heard the toilet flush as he scampered away.
He began tentatively to run again. He could feel his feet in their inappropriate footwear, the brown shoes, thudding into the ground. He was half limping. He knew it wasn’t an economical motion, that it made his legs go out to the side and that anything not moving forwards or backwards was wasted energy. He’d said that once. Here, in this very park. The past makes a mockery of us all sooner or later. The pain was unbearable now and he stopped again. He bent and flexed and twisted, trying to release whatever had seized up.
He was sure Clare had inclined her head before leaving, the way people do sometimes who want to be kissed.
He looked at the next lamppost, calculated that it was no more than fifty yards away. He used to run when he was confused, he used to run when he was worried, when he was annoyed, elated, melancholy. He set off on a third, final attempt. The hot poker inside his leg twisted up into his hip. He kept running. The lamppost was forty, thirty-five, thirty yards away. He was not limping anymore. It was something else, something even more ungainly. The runner he’d seen earlier passed again. Benjamin Tate noticed the look on his face. Now twenty-five yards. Now twenty. He passed the playground where he met her, the bench where he left her. But it wasn’t about her, had never been about her. His mind only snagged on her because it wasn’t brave enough to confront what had come after.
What if he’d sat longer on that bench, even thirty seconds longer? He saw himself getting up. Stay. He saw himself getting in the car. Stay. He saw the car reversing out of the car park, speeding down the road, approaching the roundabout. He’d spent twenty years, 175,000 hours, shrinking his existence from that very moment into the smallest nothingness imaginable, striving for the lack of life that he’d that day visited upon her. Her. He couldn’t even speak her name.
He collapsed to the ground. Crippling pain. He’d never considered its literal meaning. Such an apt turn of phrase.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
‘Stalking,’ she had said. ‘You’re not still stalking him.’ Such a sinister word. And so untrue. In Tim’s mind you had to know where someone was to stalk them. He preferred to call it ‘seeking’.
He paced again up the road. He knew many of the people who lived there – knew them to look at, at least – but not all. It was the ones he didn’t know that drew him back. He wondered how many recognised him through his different disguises. Some surely must. There was the twenty-something man with the shaven head and designer stubble. He wore V-neck T-shirts, mostly pastel coloured, that he’d either grown out of or had been too small to begin with. At the end of his lead was a dog that yapped rather than barked, that didn’t reach his ankles, its tiny legs moving ten to the dozen along the pavement. His parents, or people Tim assumed were his parents, often left his house with a basket full of dirty laundry. There was the man and woman a few doors down. Her hair had been long and sumptuous when Tim first arrived, but then she’d cut it all off. Weeks later Tim realised he’d not seen the man again. Where were all the children? There must be children in these houses. He never saw them though. He was grateful for their absence, they’re so much more curious about the world around them.
‘Working late?’ asked Evel Knievel. Tim had labelled him thus because he would spend the long summer evenings on his drive, tinkering with his bike. Bent at its side he’d rev it endlessly, head turned and a faraway look in his eye, and then suddenly he’d stop and his spanner would again probe its insides for whatever grunt or growl had so offended him.
‘No rest for the wicked.’ Tim smiled. ‘Another day, another dollar.’ He marvelled at how badly he could play these parts without evoking suspicion. Today he was the Council Official, which meant white shirt, short-sleeved and slightly ill-fitting, specs either perched on his forehead or hanging in front of him and, inevitably, the clipboard and pencil. How many evils could one carry out unchallenged if one had a clipboard to blind prying eyes and bat away awkward questions before they were ever even formed?
He had other personas. The Postman, obviously, The Jogger – and sometimes he did still jog so this worked on multiple levels – The Traffic Warden (which he’d now abandoned), the Bored Man with the Traffic Cone, and the Common Man in Overalls. They were all effective, and so far removed from his actual job that he even took some enjoyment from it. He thought of his partners, his clients and prospective clients. If only they could see him now. Where had he been in the last six months? He ran through his itinerary: Rome, New York, Hong Kong, Dubai, Nairobi, Dublin, Athens, Madrid, Beijing – or was Beijing the previous year? Semantics. He had been there, that was the point. And now he was here, standing officiously beneath a lamppost on a nothing street in a nothing town, scanning the pavements with furtive sideways sweeps. Did he expect to find what he was searching for, what he was always searching for, when he came here? Of course not, not anymore, but he came regardless because it was the only valid form of expression of his crusade – that’s what he called it now – when all else had failed. He shook his head at the mystery of it.
Simultaneously, he noted satisfactorily that the gesture emphasised his act, made him appear even more the befuddled administrator tackling a stubborn drainage issue or whatnot. In fact, what really perplexed him that early evening was how, in this technological age when everyone left a digital impression wherever they went, and even places they didn’t go but only considered going, he’d still not managed to find him. How? How was that possible? He’d expected it to take ten minutes on his phone when, five years ago, he’d sprung off the sofa and said, ‘I must find him. I must find him now.’
‘What? Who?’ A woman, not Natalie, had been beside him. He ignored her.
‘And then I must kill him.’ He was standing ramrod straight in the middle of room. ‘I’m not sure about that. But I must definitely find him.’
He balanced the clipboard on the crook of one arm and with the other ran a hand softly along the handle of the hammer that hung inside his trouser leg. He pinched the metal head between his fingers, taking pleasure in its heavy, unyielding surface, and knocked his knuckles with quiet approval against the metal. He pictured this boy, but he’d be a man now, of course, turning the corner and walking straight towards him, oblivious of the ambush he was strolling into. What happened next never completely materialised in Tim’s imaginings; being there, waiting with intent – that seemed enough to becalm him.
He’d not chosen this street at random. How foolish that would have been. No, he had chosen this particular street, at this particular time of day, because it was here and – he glanced at his watch – about now, that he’d seen him before. His back had been turned, but the limp had given him away. It was always the gait with them, wasn’t it? Uncanny. Once his own clumsy shuffle had been the thing that singled him out, and now the roles were reversed. Such symmetry.
‘It’s you,’ he’d said then. He’d looked around. ‘It’s him,’ he’d said, but no one had paid him any attention. He’d even raised his hand and pointed. And then? And then nothing. He’d just stared, slack-jawed, as the limp went away from him. He’d spent countless nights since then wondering how the boy hadn’t heard him, why he himself had just let him go. He doubted, sometimes, if it had ever even happened at all. But the assumption that it did compelled him back here. Not every night, not most nights, not even many nights, and entire months would pass sometimes, but then the urge would be back. It wouldn’t return slowly, building up over a few days – a vague idea, a thought, a serious consideration – until it could no longer be ignored. Nothing like that. It would simply not be there and then be there again, as real and reasonable as the sun, as though it had been there all the time and he’d just this moment noticed it again. He never doubted it. He would leave work early. If he was overseas he would fly back from wherever he was. Nothing continued as before until he’d returned here.
It was dark now. He had the sense that he was starting to loiter. Even the clipboard didn’t defend him indefinitely. One more pass, then that’s it. He saw no one. He reached the end of the road and turned around a final time. A movement. A change in the light just over there. He leant forward, frozen. But it was nothing. Just a dog. He was relieved. He turned again and left, hoping he’d not be back again for a long, long time.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Clare was sitting cross-legged on the carpet. She was painting her nails. Occasionally she splayed her fingers and tipped the wings of her spread hand to catch the raft of light from the window. Benjamin Tate, watching from the chair, would be cast back then to long-ago days when he used to walk home from school, watching with one cocked eye down the length of his arm as his own hand dived and arced against the dark green of the hedge.
She had not spoken now for nearly ten minutes and he was beginning to think it, she, wasn’t real. But his imagination didn’t stretch this far, and he need only extend a leg to kick her knee. Absurd, that’s what this situation was, impossible and completely absurd. Her cup was on the floor just over there, with lipstick on the rim. He had made her that cup half an hour ago.
‘Sugar, milk?’ he’d called from the kitchen, as though he was a normal human being and this was a normal part of his day. It was his wallet. That’s how all this started. What angel had reached into his pocket that day? Perhaps despite all he’d done he still had a friend in a high place.
‘I enjoyed it,’ Clare had said when she’d first arrived.
She’d handed him the book and he’d walked as calmly to the shelf as he could and filled the gap that had been irking him for days. Each morning and evening he had deliberately not looked at the conspicuous wedge of shadow that should not have been there. He had tried to mask it, minimise it, by shuffling the other books along, but that had only created more gaps elsewhere. What was it about incongruous spaces, moulds in the air in the shape of the thing missing, that troubled him so much? He was never able to see what was without fixating on what wasn’t.
‘I’ve not been able to look at birds the same way since,’ she’d continued. ‘Although it’s not really about birds, is it?’
He looked at the wall behind her, the doorframe above her, anywhere but directly at her. It was because of the dress, the dress and the way she’d done her hair in tight coils that he could imagine someone gently pulling just to watch them spring back into place. He assumed that she must be on her way out, or on her way home after being out. But she seemed in no rush at all. He had turned from the bookcase to find that she’d followed him into the room and after a few minutes hovering she had promptly sat down where she stood. He had hastened into the kitchen then to escape, and when he returned with the two cups she was still there. She had glanced up from her nails and nodded at the chair, his chair, and he sat. Her dress had ridden up her thighs a little. She was wearing black stockings. Almost immediately he felt himself begin to perspire.
‘It made me think of my father,’ she said. She was still talking about Jonathan Livingston Seagull. ‘The flying parts of it. He’s a pilot in the air force. Or he was. He’s not allowed to fly anymore because of his eyes. I’m sad for him. He misses it. He says he doesn’t, but he does. He’s my best friend. What about your family?’
There had been a beastly storm overnight. The first leaves of spring had all been shaken off and the bare branches shuddered in their new nakedness. Far above them small clouds scudded along at great pace. From his seat he couldn’t see, but had seen many times, the weak shadows that would be trying gamely to keep up, slithering over one rooftop then another.
Yes, what about his family, what had become of them? It had been Charlie’s birthday the previous week. He would have liked to have sent a card had he known where to send it. He looked back at Clare. She frowned at her fingernails, wiped away the polish and began again.
‘It’s like one long awkward silence,’ she said, not looking up, ‘coming here, I mean. Only it’s not awkward. Despite you.’ She did look at him then, peering up through long eyelashes. ‘I’m confused though. How long did you say you’d lived here?’
‘I’ve been here a while.’
‘A while,’ she repeated absently. She looked all around her, then back at him, and tilted her head as she was wont to do. ‘So, I hope you don’t mind me asking, but where is everything?’
There was the table, the small chair, there were the bookcases and the television that watched him as much as he watched it – why was that, why did he feel always that vague sense of being observed? Everything was right there.
‘Everything is right here,’ he said.
