‘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.
She wanted to tell him to take off his coat. He was sweating profusely and his obvious discomfort was making her uncomfortable too. She thought she should probably leave. She didn’t want to be cruel. But that was also the reason why she stayed. The book she was holding now was called Jonathan Livingston Seagull. She held it up to him and he nodded, yes, he’d read it. ‘Apparently he lives within us all,’ she read. ‘That’s exciting then.’ On impulse she dropped the book in her bag. She knew he saw her do it, but he said nothing.
‘Have you read them all?’
‘No. Not all.’ She was about to say that she didn’t blame him, that life was too short to spend it with your head down, that she always preferred to be outward facing, when he added, ‘Three hundred and sixty-eight. I’ve read three hundred and sixty-eight. That’s about eighty-four per cent.’
She managed not to smile. ‘How do you know that?’
More sweat then. ‘Please, take off your coat.’
He coughed into his hand. He said, even quieter than before, that he kept a ledger.
‘You know, Benjamin Tate, that doesn’t surprise me.’ She could so easily place him at the table, writing down each title in alternative coloured inks to make it more legible. She wondered if he wrote down the dates he started and finished reading each book, assumed he did, with identical gaps between each word. ‘Do you make comments too?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Just sometimes?’
‘Sometimes I can’t think of anything good to say.’
