Pete smiled again. He didn’t belong there, in that basement. He looked like someone who should own a yacht, or have friends who did. He always said the right thing, and when he said the wrong thing he said it the right way, which seemed to matter more. But what Benjamin Tate liked most about him was that he treated everyone the same way, even the stranger types. He suspected it was less to do with goodness and more to do with self-absorption, a narcissistic bubble that enveloped him and enabled him, without difficulty, to remain unchanged, exactly who he was, regardless of his environment, but he didn’t mind that. That made no difference to Benjamin Tate. He had once seen a painting of an ancient ship being tossed about on a wild sea. The scene was so visceral he could almost hear the damp wood creaking and groaning in the storm. Where had he seen it, that picture? Somewhere dark and dingy like this. But that’s what Pete was like. What did it matter if the painter had witnessed the scene or imagined it, the effect was the same. Pete was still holding the clock in his hands, regarding it carefully. A flicker of something came to his face and he looked up at Benjamin Tate, grinning.
‘Hey, you want to see time really fly?’
Suddenly he threw the clock like a Frisbee over the top of the filing cabinets. Three pairs of eyes watched it sail disc-like through the air. It seemed to hang forever, almost not moving, until it dived down and there was a loud shattering noise on the other side of the room.
‘For Pete’s sake,’ he said, smiling at the now familiar joke. ‘The old ones are the best. That’s why I like you, buddy.’ He winked. ‘It’s all good.’
Benjamin Tate was stunned. A little disturbed. He couldn’t grasp chaotic gestures like that. It was too cavalier, too devil-may-care for his liking. There were rules, rules kept order, order was important. He watched Pete stroll back to his desk. Was it nonchalance? Nerve? Cocksureness? Probably a bit of all three, and other things besides. He didn’t so much strut as roll sinuously in his joints. He had a way about him, did Pete. He turned over a card and moved his hands to the keyboard as if nothing had happened.
Benjamin Tate waited for whatever had been pitched sideways in his chest – that ship? – to right itself and then looked back down at his card. Douglas. Obesity. High blood pressure. Diabetes. Forty-three. Still alive. Living just three streets away. Married. Second marriage. Yeast-free diet recommended. He glanced at the screen and saw the bit of paper. It allowed him to go on.
Douglass, M. Dead. Dead for years. Aged fifty-seven. Stroke. A smoker. Benjamin Tate had never paused to wonder why it was necessary to store for posterity such records, records of the old, disappeared souls that no longer filled the gaps they once did. Tap, tap, tap.
Downes, T. Seventy-two. Arthritis in both hands. Mild depression. Cataracts. Chicken pox as a child. A long list. Benjamin Tate recorded it all.
Downes, V. Six. Measles. A bump on the head from a fall at school.
Dove, B. Ninety-eight. Ninety-eight and counting. Three cards’ worth. All full on both sides. A scribbled story of survival. Tap, tap, tap.
Dover, B. Nineteen. Suicide.
Dovesett, K. Thirty-six. Appendicitis. Benjamin Tate checked both sides of the card but that was all there was. Appendicitis. Nothing more.
Dow, A. Sixty-two. Cancer. There was always one. No, there was always many more than one. He typed the word out and then read it silently in his head. Cancer. What was it about that disease that separated it from all the others, that stirred such feelings of disquiet and inevitability? It was the stalker you can’t shake off. That’s how it felt, as though it had singled you out even before you knew it existed and had, ever since, been closing grimly in. Is it really true that the Komodo dragon poisons its victims with a single bite and then patiently tracks the doomed beast down to the place where the toxins have finally felled it? The poor creature, what a way to go, shivering woozily beneath a bush in the sand, already on the brink, noticing, at a stage when it’s too weak to do anything about it, those dead reptilian eyes staring lewdly at it from the other side of the clearing. Would there be a moment’s pause, a moment of sizing up, one side assessing and the other accepting, or would that giant, low-hung head, all scales and hissing tongue, just keep swinging on the end of its thick neck as it advanced?
Doway, D. Sixty-eight. Cancer. Again. But in remission. Hopeful. The period after the bite, thinking you’ve escaped.
Dowdall, L. Forty-one. Stress. Asthma. Eczema.
Dowley... Downer... Downes... tap, tap, tap. Downing... Dowton... Doyley.
The steady rhythm. That easy pace. There was a cushion at his back and one on his seat. His mug had a picture of a palm tree wrapped around it. He’d never been anywhere where palms grew. That didn’t matter. Its colours were bright against the background. The tape and card covered the date. The big things had ended. That didn’t matter either. He’d have fish later. He always had fish on Tuesdays. The choice of fish, and how he cooked it, was variable. He was leaning towards hake. Possibly grilled. He didn’t need to decide yet. The small things. The safety of the small things. A hand on his shoulder made him jump.
‘Time to come up for air, buddy.’ Pete half turned away but then stopped. ‘You okay? You’re as white as a baby’s arse.’ Benjamin Tate’s breathing was fast. He put his hand to his forehead and noticed he was sweating.
‘I’m okay.’
‘You work too hard, buddy. Slow down. Come on, it’s time for our elevenses.’ Benjamin Tate looked up at the clock. It wasn’t there. Pete laughed. ‘Long gone, mate.’
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.
