Benjamin Tate looked at the fan, parts of the fan, smashed on the floor. He regretted it now. Where had this heat come from? It had sat on top of him, stagnant and thick, for days. He’d reach for something, stretch out an arm or extend himself in some other way, and bits of him would peel apart, like he’d been smeared with a paste that didn’t dry. It was too early in the year for this. It was still spring, the tree was all made up but already it seemed to be wilting. ‘I don’t know what’s happening either,’ he said to it. When had the seasons started playing fast and loose with the natural order of things? Didn’t they realise that order was there for a reason, that everything had its place, that one thing follows another thing and makes the next thing possible?
The poor fan, it had been all abuzz with giddy enthusiasm when he’d retrieved it from the airing cupboard, but almost immediately it became apparent that it was no longer fit for purpose. He contemplated it for a moment, watched it toil desperately back and forth in its cage, rattling annoyingly, continuously, coughing out gusts of hot air at whatever crossed its path, then he had picked it up and swung it against the wall. The doddering old fool had died immediately of shock, but Benjamin Tate had continued swinging until its ribcage split open and its brittle innards splintered off in all directions. He had glared about then, seeking a next victim. He’d focused on the perfidious television – perhaps its hunchback, its deformity, is what made it so snide and resentful. He thought of the brassy number four with its impish, irreverent smirk. He imagined it on the floor jumping up and down as he pummelled it.
The fan wasn’t an isolated case. Various bits of crockery, a cup, two plates, one breakfast bowl which had still been full at the time, had all met similarly abrupt and brutal ends in recent weeks.
These furious squalls that blew up in him now, they had caught him unawares. He lived now in an almost constant state of volatile unease. It’s not what he’d expected. He’d expected instead a gentle return to peace and quiet, boredom, a safe, ordered progression through the days with no sudden movements. Just like before. But nothing was as before. Or, more to the point, everything was as before, and that was the problem.
It was Thursday. The crack-and-whip of the sheets wasn’t quite as crisp as he’d have liked. He took the dressing gown and slippers off the stool and then wrestled with the hot tap in the kitchen while the kettle gurgled behind him. He sat down at the table. The brown shoes, the black ones, he hardly noticed. At 8.35 he slammed the door behind him, hearing the number rattle and shake on its hook as he descended the stairs. Would it never fall down?
The cat might have been there again, on that low wall, or it might not have been. Benjamin Tate walked with his head down, staring the entire way at the pavement a yard in front of him. The vast white building glared at him as he approached. His steps echoed down its stairway and at 8.56 – he must have been walking quicker than normal – he sat down at his desk.
Dunne, K. Thirty-six. He scanned down the list. All the normal things, along with a succession of broken bones. The clavicle, the humerus, the sacrum, the radius, the femur, the tibia and fibula, multiple ribs, carpals, metacarpals… Osteogenesis imperfecta. A collagen deficiency. Years ago, Benjamin Tate would have winced, going through that list, imagining the pain of each fracture. He’d seen it once, that man in the mud, balancing on the bank before momentum and gravity took him, or most of him. His oversized wellies had been sucked down, holding fast his feet to the spot. He’d teetered a moment, at an unlikely angle, until something gave way and he went crashing over. Benjamin Tate had laughed; the man’s rain jacket had ridden up his back, tipping his hood over his face and exposing, above his belt, a slab of blotchy white skin. But then the screaming had started. Of course, each break is different, both by degree and location. Would a leg bone hurt more than any other? He remembered his own injury. It hadn’t hurt at all at first. Then it had hurt a great deal. Poor K, whoever he or she was. He turned the card over. The entries stopped abruptly. Whoever he or she had been.
Chairs shuffled around him, voices, loud and then much softer, Pete laughing. Benjamin Tate kept his head down and continued working his way, diligently, reliably, fastidiously, through the cards. Tap, tap, tap went his fingers on the keys. Tap, tap, tap. The clock had been replaced. Next time he would be the one to throw it. Time moved ever on. At lunchtime, he made his way to the bench out the front, ate the sandwiches he’d prepared and looked alternately at the sky, the grass and the trees until the hour passed. At one point a man sat briefly beside him. When he stood up a bookmark fell from somewhere about his person. Benjamin Tate picked it up. It was a patch of material onto which the word ‘daddy’ had been embroidered with three kisses beneath it. He put it in his pocket and watched the man walk away.
Dylan, B. Eighteen. More voices around him. One voice missing. Darren wasn’t there. Damien rather. Pete and Sophia sat next to each other now. He noticed them, when he got up from his desk or returned to it, leaning into each other, murmuring things under their breaths, earnest things, playful things, exclusive things just between them. Tap, tap, tap.
At day’s end he returned to his flat. Things were where he’d left them, where they were meant to be. The window was closed. Thursday was meat night, which offered him a great many options. Were there more types of edible meat than bones in the body? He’d have to look it up. He always had chicken. It was the most versatile of the meats, in his opinion. He did little with it that evening, just let it cook for ten minutes and then heated up some peas. He ate quickly at the table, taking little enjoyment from the dish. Then he washed up what he’d used, checked the water level in the kettle, and went to bed.
It was not yet 8pm, it was still light outside, but he didn’t feel like reading, wasn’t interested in watching television, or being watched by it. He stomped into his bedroom. It felt strange, retiring at such an hour. He kept the curtains open and stayed as still as he could, watching the sky change colour and darken like a bruise. Eventually it grew so dark he could see nothing of it at all, just a vast, depthless void that seemed to press against his window and then seep into and fill up his room, and he wasn’t sure if he was even still awake.
Benjamin Tate was a boy again, he dreamed he was a boy again. He knew the house. It was a long way from where he was born but it is where his memories had begun. He saw himself standing in the kitchen. He had a dishcloth in one hand and a plate in the other. He can’t have been more than six years old. The radio was on and his parents were dancing on the tiles in front of him, as they so often did. He and Charlie were watching them and making faces at each other but he certainly was warmed, reassured, by the sight. He saw his mother’s bare feet, hard and cracked at the heel – she danced on tiptoes – and the way his father looked at her, with amusement and something else. It was longing, but he didn’t know that then.
He saw the trunk of the great oak tree that split in two the wooden fence at the end of their garden, could feel again its cold surface, hard and smooth as stone. Who lived on the other side of that fence? A slight woman, but stern, who always wore dark-green slacks and industrial boots. He remembered her as being unfeasibly old – but then aren’t all adults unfeasibly old when you’re young – and that he’d been afraid of her. She used to let them, he and Charlie, hop over the fence and swing on her hammock. Onto the trunk his father had chalked three cricket stumps and they would all, his mother too, charge about late into the evening. He recalled the grass-itch on his legs when he climbed stickily into bed.
How dismal it was, reliving those days, knowing the wreck that was to become of them all.
‘What about your family?’ Clare had asked him.
‘I’ve a brother, but we’re not in touch anymore.’ Can you be estranged from a sibling?
‘That’s all?’ she asked. ‘Just a brother?’
His mother, untypically, had gone before his father, but then she had always been the instigator. She’d not been the same after the thing that had happened, she acted as though it happened to her somehow, and had developed dementia early in life, while still in her forties. He suspected, cruelly perhaps, but everyone was cruel for a while, that she’d gone there deliberately, that she was hiding.
He went to visit her in that desolate building with its misleadingly bright garden rimmed with benches and flowerbeds for as long as he could stand it, and had then given up the ghost – or given up on the ghost. His mother would gaze in his general direction, seeing nothing but the shape of a person. She’d look at him in turn indifferently, inquisitively, accusingly, which was when he thought she knew him best. She’d blurt out disconnected phrases, fragments of things that were impossible to piece together.
‘Don’t let it happen,’ she said once, fearfully, fretfully. ‘Promise me.’
He nodded at her but she grabbed his shoulders and shook them with surprising violence.
‘No, you must promise me!’ she shouted.
He said that he promised, and then leaned in to hold her, to offer comfort through the cage, but as soon as his arms opened, her face changed and she lashed out, catching him with a closed fist on the cheek. Her wedding ring had torn open the skin and he stood there, shocked, holding a hand to his face while she circled him warily, poised to strike again.
‘Don’t worry,’ his father had said when they were walking back to the car. It was late afternoon and the sun had been especially bright, making his father’s eyes water. ‘She won’t know the difference.’
Perhaps staying away after that had been the easy option. It hadn’t felt easy. But then she’d died a few weeks later, considerately, falling down the stairs and breaking her neck, sparing him long nights of doubt and self-recrimination.
His father hadn’t lasted much longer. The life-force had drained out of him the night the nursing home spoke to him in those tender, hushed tones and, after withering on the vine for a torturous six months, visibly shrivelling up from the outside in, he too broke off the stem and dropped to dust. The doctors named his disease to explain it to themselves, but Benjamin Tate knew it wasn’t that, knew it was simple sorrow that he’d been unable to endure.
‘Dad?’ he said. They were alone in the too-big house and the old man was in his favourite chair. The television flickered in his open eyes as the room darkened and cooled around them. What had they been watching, an old western maybe. When the film ended those dazed, unblinking eyes had been open still. ‘Dad?’ he said again, not daring to look. The room was cold by then, a chill had settled on all the surfaces he wasn’t touching. Then, much later, ‘You’ve left me all alone.’
Where was Charlie in all of this? He was never there. Perhaps he had already gone to the city. What did he do there? Benjamin Tate never fully knew.
‘Now we’re finally equal,’ Charlie had sneered at the funeral, their father’s. Benjamin Tate had hobbled away without reply, too absorbed in his own grief, but the comment had snagged in his thoughts like a burr in a dog’s coat and he’d carried it with him for a long time. He carried it still. Like so much else.
He recalled suddenly the night he’d packed up the house, discovered all that secret debris of lives interrupted. There were the love letters, hundreds of them, written over decades, from the time before they were married to the time just before the thing that had happened. There was a small ornamental elephant with a story behind it only the deceased knew, school reports, his, Charlie’s, old photographs, birthday cards. He found, late one evening, the star that he’d placed on top of the Christmas tree as a boy. What was it doing in a kitchen drawer, among the batteries and the bike locks and the broken bits of things that wouldn’t now be fixed? He’d picked it up and then sat down on the linoleum tiles, holding it in his lap for a long time.
Probably the hardest things to pack away were the clothes. There were grease stains in the collars of his father’s shirts, strands of dyed blonde hair, his mother’s, entwined in the wool of her cardigan. It was about 4am when Benjamin Tate noticed hanging behind the door his father’s suit bag. He took it down off the hook. It was flimsy and light without the suit inside it. His father had only ever owned the one. It was navy blue, blue enough to appear black when required. He wore it to weddings, christenings, funerals, his wife’s and his own. Something inside Benjamin Tate, at that point, had given way, and he’d rushed downstairs, to that same kitchen drawer, and returned with a black refuse bag into which he stuffed everything that had been stacked on the bed. An hour later that bag was slouched like a forsaken old dog on a doorstep in town, the neon sign above the charity shop blinking its thanks as he limped away.
He looked at the shattered television. When had that happened? How? But good. Good. The back end of a hardback stuck out through the last jagged shards. He thought of referred anger. Did it exist? Of course it did. He imagined most anger was in some way referred, caused by one thing, expressed on another. He was stupid to have left her like that. But who did he mean now? History repeats. Be brave.
The bench. Stay. The yellow car. The two bicycles. Had there been a great silent bird up there somewhere, peering imperviously down? Or was he embellishing? What did it matter. Details. Mere details.
In the few remaining pixels of the television screen he could see the vague, muffled outline of his trousered legs. Maybe it did watch him after all. Something did. Maybe it was showing him now. Or warning him. You’re not a whole person. You’re not really here. You’re just a faint impression of a person. He knew of creatures who existed only in the dark, at the bottom of oceans, in caves. These were anaemic, spectral beings that couldn’t survive the light. He was among them again, had always been among them. A cave dweller, the ultimate cave dweller, hidden away, out of sight, growing dimmer and less present all the time until people passed through him, saw through him, without ever noticing, like he’d never even been there.
It was Thursday. Or it was the following Thursday? Or was it the Thursday after that? Recurring. That was the word, wasn’t it, for these days? The crack-and-whip. The sheets had been changed and changed again. The brown shoes. The black shoes. The red door closing – slamming – behind him. Tap, tap, tap. The dim alleyways between the cabinets. Drawers that didn’t shut pouncing out to crack his shins. All the names. All the people he’d never know, who’d never know him. The pavement beneath his feet. The cramped kitchen. The sky changing out of the window. The blackness creeping in and then creeping out. The dressing gown and slippers. Beginning it all again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Clare was gazing vacantly in front of her. Without taking any of it in, her eyes passed in turn over the scrap of paper bent beneath the table leg, the table above it that fidgeted regardless, the menu that never changed. There was nothing very much on her mind. She was fortunate like that. It was Friday morning. There were two people in the café besides her; an old man who was seated at the unsteady table – thick languid drops of egg yolk dripped off it onto his grey slacks but he’d not noticed – and a man in a fluorescent-yellow jacket. Clare would not have been able to describe either of them. She was leaning forwards over the counter, resting on her elbows. Her chin was cupped in her hands and every so often she tipped her head forwards to allow a single finger to brush her fringe delicately out of her eyes. She had no idea that she was being watched.
Benjamin Tate would not have called it a lair, although from where he was he could see directly through the glass façade of the café while being fairly certain that anyone looking the other way would not have easily seen him. He had stumbled upon this spot by chance, when he had set off on the 749 steps that led to the café and stopped after 680 of them. At this time of the morning, it was now 8.43, the patch of grass between the path and the high wall was always in shade, and he’d discovered that if he stood very still against the bricks he would often be unnoticed even by the people walking past. Clare was there this morning. She hadn’t always been. Twice he’d seen instead a much older lady behind the counter, her mother, he presumed, although there was no obvious resemblance; perhaps Clare was her father’s daughter. Her hair was different. It had been cut and styled in a way that he thought quite caustic, shaved on one side, a fringe chopped angrily at an angle across her forehead. It didn’t suit her, or rather it didn’t suit the version of her he’d imagined for himself. It annoyed him, those hard edges, on something he wanted to be soft, but many things now annoyed him. He tried not to blame her and began walking.
Clare had been waiting for Benjamin Tate these past weeks without realising that’s what she’d been doing, and without any particular emotion. Each time the door had swung open at about this time of day she had looked over expecting to see his sad figure poised there, and each time it had not been him she’d continued on exactly as before. She would not visit him. The conclusion she’d drawn about broken pipes still stood. It was his turn, or it was no one’s turn.
It was a glorious morning, breathless and bright. He tried to imagine the world without people in it, with just the animals roaming around nibbling at the dewy grass. He wondered if it would be improved. At the kerb he stopped. A line of cars had been halted by something and were fuming impatiently and muttering beneath their breath. He looked up, watched for a moment a white line that was drawing itself arrow straight across a sky that was flat and blue and far away. We’re everywhere, he thought. The cars still hadn’t moved and he put his hand out, stepped into a narrow gap and sidled through it. Enough time had been wasted. He crossed the road. He was beneath the café sign. He was reaching forwards, grasping the metal handle that had caught the early sun and was warm to the touch.
‘Well, well,’ Clare said. Both customers glanced up, at her, at him, and then returned disinterestedly to their breakfasts.
He approached the counter. Behind her a coffee machine was clunkily realigning itself.
‘Hello,’ he said.
‘And here I was thinking you were avoiding me.’
Since he’d started dreaming again one dream had kept recurring. It was less a dream and more a moment. He was on a mountainside. There was a thick, impenetrable fog all around him. High peaks reared up although he couldn’t see them. They emphasised his smallness, or his isolation, he wasn’t sure which. In front of him was a barely discernible dark shape. It seemed at first like the last glimpse of something departing, but he realised gradually that it was actually coming towards him, that what he believed to be its back was in fact its front, and he had only to remain where he was for a few seconds more and it would reveal itself to him. He always awoke then.
‘I think I’ve been avoiding a lot of things,’ he said.
